Gene Feldman: Tonight on Neon Protocol, we're diving straight into the shaping what comes next. I'm Gene, and we're also joined by Mark, Mike and Damon from the Neon Protocol team. And we're going to be exploring XR, AI, Spatial Computing, and the various infrastructures that make them real. We're here really to break down what's working, what's changing, and what's about to break open. There's no hype cycles or demo theater here. It's just a conversation. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Every follow or share will really help us grow in this space. And joining us on tonight's episode, we're joined by Scott Patterson from Lenovo to dig into the hardware that's really driving the future of XR and spatial computing. And Scott's really gonna help us break down the key trade-offs in today's headsets. why modular designs matter and what it takes to build these devices that can handle the real training, collaboration and field work, especially around several relevant industries. So we're gonna have a conversation on a quick grounded look and of what makes everything possible. So Scott, I think I've hammered on and got through this introduction as best I could. So Scott, if you wanna introduce yourself, we welcome to Neon Protocol and would love to hear your story.
Scott Patterson: Okay. Sure. Yeah, thanks so much for having me everybody and thanks Gene. Yeah, so a little bit about me, know, my XR journey and I don't think we even knew it was going to be XR at the time. My VR journey though certainly started in 2014 with the Oculus Dev1. DevKit, you know, one off Kickstarter. So I was working in learning technology at the time and really once the technology matured enough to really be used for VR learning, introduced a large VR learning program at the firm that I was working at for our internal users and led that effort and then started getting into a few other kind of enterprise VR use cases and now certainly XR use cases. So I'm very much enterprise focused. you know, if you got any questions that come from the VR learning background, which of course is still one of the biggest enterprise, you know, use cases for VR. I'm especially excited though at the intersection of XR and AI, you know, I mean, obviously AI came in as the metaverse hype cycle was crashing as we all predicted.
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks
Scott Patterson: And that's really taken the center stage for all venture capital, et cetera. But there's tons of amazing use cases for XR still, and certainly at the intersection of AI. And that's one of the things that I'm a big promoter of as well, is always use the technology and frankly the venture capital and the consumer and commercial markets that are hungry for it and intersect that with our industry. And what can we mix when we have those ingredients in the kitchen. a little bit about me, but yeah, I would say I'm super excited about the AI smart glasses and watching that space very heavily on both on the consumer and the commercial side. I think this is going to be the year and I'm a little bit of anyone disagrees, but it certainly seems like this is going to be the year for the AI smart glasses, you know.
Gene Feldman: It really is shaping it that way. mean, I've been watching the Evan G1 or Evan realities G1s and at first it was, it was, it was neat. had some really good features, but you're watching it really put a kind of grow and almost start playing it down and what Meta has been doing.
Scott Patterson: Yes, yes. I, and you and I have got, I think I've got eight pairs over here right now. I'm a natural eyeglass wearer like you. I've got contacts in right now, but it looks like four five of us are eyeglass wearers. So why not have, you know, expanded human performance if I have to wear these anyway at zero positive of user friction, you know?
Damon: Hmm.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. Especially, especially one of the things I like is they added a lot of features that make it relevant. So I, I w like you, I came from, I'm in the learning and development space. And one of the, one of the biggest features that I thought was, was so great is the, ⁓ teleprompter. You know, that how many people suffer from the fear of public speaking. mean, I would watch brand new, like business analysts having to speak to the C-suite and they have no experience.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah, absolutely.
Damon: I never understood that. Never understood that.
Scott Patterson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And it's and it's one of like, I think it's a top three fear. It's like right below death and divorce or something. I mean, it's really high up there. It's some crazy number of people are terrified, like literally near panic attack level. So absolutely. What a great benefit of humanity just in that alone. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. ⁓ yeah, absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm so excited. just bought a pair of G1s. I haven't gotten them yet, but I'm excited. It's going amazing.
Damon: They're on their way.
Scott Patterson: They're great. They're great. And the interesting thing about the G1 is lucky too is, you know, there's no camera. So we're getting into this space, you know, there's some public reaction. back to the whole glass hole era. we're seeing that. I've noticed that when I'm wearing mine, because I've got prescription lenses. I've got multiple pairs of the Metare band. So with my prescription lens clear, I'll just wear everywhere, of course. But enough people are onto them that I do occasionally get a reaction. And I'm just terrified, because I'm so blind, that somebody somewhere will make me take them off, and I can't see. And I don't have a pair of backup prescriptions with me. But I think the interest of
Gene Feldman: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: about the evens is there's no camera so you get a lot of function I plus you get the wave guide you get the text which is so much faster for an output method for us to process then you're not scaring anybody with the cameras so they don't even know you know you're wearing them
Mike Vann: So this is audio, but I have the events and the little clip-ons, which are actually really, really ⁓ nice. So these guys have picked a lane and they're really good at it. And I think ⁓ that company is just going to continue to grow. And Scott, you probably agree, they look really interesting. ⁓ But I think you're going to see a lot of competition doing exactly what these guys are doing.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Damon: Wow.
Gene Feldman: apps. Yeah. And I mean, I think where they also hit the mark is the interface. The user interface is friendly, you know, cause one of the things, and Mike, I know you can attest to cause you have a pair of the displays and not to get into this whole comparison. Sorry. What you guys aren't seeing is Mark is showing, is doing his show and tell of showing off all of his fancy glasses now.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mike Vann: Yep, idea.
Damon: He's
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: Yeah, I was also going to mention the... I really actually like the Rokid displays. You know, for their stereoscopic, not monoscopic. People really don't notice it. I mean, there's one camera, right? And I feel when they first launched, it was a little rocky, kind of like HTC usually does, you know? But now, as a developer, I'm...
Mike Vann: There you go.
Scott Patterson: So it's raining in it. ⁓ I do too. Yeah.
Mike Vann: Yeah, that's what I've heard. I haven't seen those.
Damon: ⁓ really? Ha ha ha!
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah.
Mark G.: kind of thinking it's pretty cool, right? It has a lot of the same features as the meta and also, you know, your teleprompter app. I'm also digging the fact that you can control what models you put on it. And also, they have a cool thing called dual link, where they have like something like 60 languages that in real time, you're getting both. Say I do English in Mandarin or I do English in Vietnamese or I have a friend of mine who's Greek. Right. He did Greek and English, right. You know, and it was the fact that through that chip and tethering it with the phone, right. You really get sort of what I call traditionally, right. The accessibility technology, the assistive tech capability of it. ⁓ you know, and for me, that's where I'm really excited on the enterprise side. Right. ⁓ we're looking at, you know, cause I work for big Brown, we're looking at tools where a supervisor can understand Haitian.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mark G.: Right. ⁓ And if he has, or she has a platform where they can better communicate with, you know, the employees, right. That's a gold mine. Right. ⁓ So it's a case where, you know, that aspect of the AI glasses is really cool. For me, I generally like the idea of display functionality because you don't need AR superpowers, right. But to have something like a HUD or have something where I can highlight what the camera's seeing. Assistively, you know from an operations standpoint is really exciting and I'm seeing like the devices you guys mentioned plus a bunch of others plus some that I can't talk about right We're really seeing this movement towards that low power green display for a lot of different platforms now, which is really interesting sort of Scott I'm sure you remember right it was the Informational reality spin on the wearables, right? It was HUD's
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mark G.: combined with the devices, I kind of feel like we're sort of starting to loop back into that phase, right? So.
Gene Feldman: I agree. mean like I always look at because I was a big space top fanatic when space top came out I absolutely love it I think it's still a great tool because the thing I liked about it is I can it's my PC It's whatever's on my PC gets I don't I don't need anything special except the license their software, but I know space top the past 12 months have been kind of they've had a lot of changes so you know, so it's looking at what's coming next, but One of the things that I've looked at as I'm a big motorcycle enthusiast and a hut, mean, realizing there's a tapped in market of people, of where a HUD makes perfect sense. You know, like I've talked to, you know, several of the companies, like through even and all that and saying, once it's available on my motorcycle, then you know, it's completely ready. You know, because it, you know, and even with other activities, like I, one of the things I've always watched too is if you watch action sports,
Damon: Hmph.
Gene Feldman: They're starting to get some really interesting HUD displays in ski glasses and swimming glasses.
Damon: Hmph. Hmph.
Gene Feldman: or swimming goggles.
Damon: We knew which man.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ that would be interesting. Yeah. Well, and I'm a fan of the HUD because frankly, you know, we start looking at input output models, human interaction, you know, I could first of all see some real great utility for hand gesture, you know, recognition at some point without the EMG band. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Good.
Scott Patterson: Because, but the input being audio, for the most part, like I can speak and get what I want fairly quickly and I'm patient with myself in that, but I'm not patient for technology returning results in a very slow method for me to then process. So. you know, the AI audio glasses only, you know, I have a lot of use cases and I don't want to undersell those because there's so much stuff we can do with those, you know, but I love having the green screen just so can read the results because I can obviously read way faster than I can listen just like everybody can. And I can get a much ⁓ greater level of detail around that too. ⁓ I'm a big fan of having a lot of output and quick processing of the output coming off of these.
Lucky Gobindram: Thank
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely.
Scott Patterson: My kind of longer term vision is for the enterprise or consumer, it's really the same. And it's kind of hinted at in what we're seeing in the rumored Apple AI glasses coming, display lists, is distinguished between with displays and without. But it's fascinating when you release the rumors that one of, have two cameras on each temple, but one is a lower res kind of ambient always on camera. just to have ambient intelligence around the environmental and perhaps other things. Perhaps it's gonna watch me at the gym, be able to recognize what equipment I'm on and then do something with Apple Health. So to me, even the medium term vision is the ability to provide human support. for whatever performance we're doing, whatever act we're doing at the time of need. whether I'm sitting here on my Mac, and I forget how to use the auto some on Excel, and Siri through the glasses sees I'm struggling with that and just takes over and makes a shortcut just takes a mouse away from me and does it like a robotic process automation. Why couldn't they do that they own all the back end hooks of all the operating systems, you know, so, so I think that kind of concept both at a probably a hint level all the way to a let me just you're just going to be the human like back to the claw bot thing a few weeks ago looking for humans to just be the human in in IRL to do a task for AI you know so I could I could be onboarded into a new job and and basically 10 minutes sign the paperwork put the glasses on I'm on the factory floor and I'm just going through the motions that it's directing me to do you know for the first few days so
Gene Feldman: You
Scott Patterson: ⁓ But that idea goes pretty deep and wide about whatever type of performance we could be doing. And I think that the glasses are really the most intuitive and the easiest wearable to do that. that's why we're seeing so much ⁓ revenue out there, seeing really every company in the XR pivot to include this in their portfolios. Yeah.
Mark G.: Hey Scott, quick question. Do you feel there's sort of in maybe in the last year or so, sort of a divergence in hardware, right? From sort of that high performance XR device now to sort of what we'd call like a low cost, low security sort of platform. Are you seeing that or am I totally off?
Scott Patterson: in the kind of the wearables or AI smart glasses space or XR HMDs ⁓ or AR. Tell me more. Because I think we're following the consumers. I think ultimately the consumers are in charge right now. They're not buying VR headsets as we know, according to last couple quarters of statistics. That's pretty flat. ⁓
Damon: Hahaha!
Scott Patterson: Meta has, you know, stopped subsidizing them as much as they did for their MR headsets. You know, there's a price increase in the consumer side. I'm trying to make sure everything I'm saying is public knowledge, but I'm pretty sure it's public knowledge that they stopped all the computer skews as well. They stopped the enterprise skews, right? Yeah, yeah. They stopped the enterprise skew, though. That's public knowledge, I think, at this point. So they no longer sell, know, just a few skews, which is probably
Lucky Gobindram: Hahahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: Totally relate, Scott, totally relate the problem, yeah.
Damon: Ha ha ha.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: for the best. They did not surface MDM hooks in the OS across all the devices and then just allow MDM providers to hook into that like on an iPhone. ⁓ So we'll see what their longer term plan is for that besides making their MDM free. But anyway, yeah, I think it depends on what you're looking at. I don't think that the XR market mark is really that. I think we have the luxury of being long term strategists. It's really just reactive. mean, to be, I would love to meet someone that could argue that point against it. And I'm wrong all the time. But I mean, like to have an idea of what the hardware might be in the next three years, and devote significant amount of money to that, I think would be a mistake right now. And I think people who did that three years ago are out of business right now.
Mark G.: So let's flip it then. So do you think maybe then the acceptance of adoption of AI glasses is more around the onboarding experience versus something like XR?
Scott Patterson: why again, I think most people, first of all, you kind of, you know, ⁓ gave a little hint there and that's, don't think most people consider AI smart glasses XR. I think we do in the industry and certainly all the supply chain is coming from, from us, you know. ⁓ but I think more and more, if that takes off as its own category and matures over, you years, I think more and more of that will become more distinct and more of it's still wearable category. ⁓ What was your question again?
Mark G.: So do you feel the appeal of, well, as practitioners of XR, one of the big challenges we always had to deal with was the onboarding process. Things have always gotten better. But with specifically AI glasses, maybe you want to talk about, or do you agree that I feel one of the reasons why you're seeing such a rapid adoption and acceptance to it is the onboard experience is way better than something like XR.
Scott Patterson: to use it. Yes, yes, yes. 100 % agree. Now I understand that, the user onboarding to the technology, 100 % agree, Mark. I mean, there's so many people who I'll be wearing either my Rokids, my Evins, I've got the Halliday, they're all prescriptions. So it makes it little difficult for a random stranger that's looking through Coke bottle to see what I'm seeing. I could give them a 10 minute overview at a wedding and they're immediately going to buy one. That was the onboarding. It was super easy. You can watch YouTube. It's very intuitive. works even if you don't know how to turn it on. It's getting better. Yeah, but I mean you can put the sunglasses on they work you know so it works even if you don't know what you're doing out of the box it's a working function.
Lucky Gobindram: It's getting better too. It's getting way better. Right?
Damon: That's key. That's key. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: It's also natural behavior, right? How many times in your life have you, like, if you're not one of us, Kiki, have you gone and been like, let me put on a computer on my face, right? And like, it's legit a computer. It's also, one is, think the lines converge eventually. mean, metas try to play with it, right? If you look at all the new stuff that's come out on display in the last two weeks and like what you can do with it, all of a they're starting to make it smart, right? And like...
Damon: Exactly.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: the band has showing value, right? And even Apple's trying to copy that band thing of what you can start doing with the Apple watch and the connected ecosystem, Lines are gonna blur heavily, right? mean.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. Like one of the things I've actually started noticing in the Midwest is, you know, ⁓ getting into like the generations, know, Gen X has always been kind of, we like technology, we just don't trust it a lot because we don't want it to let us down. We've, our hopes are really high on what we've seen. And, but what I've noticing is that with the AI smart glasses, a lot of Gen Xers are going to it as hearing devices more than anything else because
Scott Patterson: Yes, yes.
Damon: Yeah. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Cool. Utility.
Mike Vann: Yep.
Gene Feldman: They don't have to, they don't have to worry about putting a hearing aid in because I'm a Gen Xer, name and element. I'm not old. I'm 17. I don't care what anybody says. You know, I'm not ready for hearing aids, but in spirit, but we grew up without volume limiters. You know, there's a reason why we can't hear today.
Damon: Right.
Lucky Gobindram: You're in spirit, in spirit, Jim.
Mike Vann: It's all those concerts, Gene. It's all the concerts.
Damon: That's right. ⁓
Mark G.: And if we had it, we turned them off. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. And so I've noticed that people that a lot of people that are gravitating to this, they're gravitating to it not because of the cool factor, is what AR and VR I think always had. They're gravitating it to the, relevancy factor, which is kind of going back to what Mark was alluding to.
Damon: functionality. that, that assistive tech that Mark talks about. Yeah, exactly. Well, the same can be said for the HUD that we were talking about earlier, right? It's not just HUD for HUD's sake. It's actually putting information up that somebody wants or needs or both.
Mike Vann: Utility. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I agree with you.
Gene Feldman: Well, well, think about military application. Airplanes have been using HUDs for years. And then I go back to the Apache helicopter, which I, my father-in-law was part of the quality program. So I always, that helicopter always has very special meaning to me, but you've got a pilot who's looking through a HUD on one eye and looking through reality through another eye that they, that they found that it is possible to use this type of technology in practical application.
Damon: ⁓ yeah.
Gene Feldman: It's just now we have to, to me, feel like we now, instead of selling it to people, we have to find the really good use cases that I think are going to the lowest common denominator to as many people as possible.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah, it's gonna happen naturally, right? Sorta like the cell phone.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, and to Scott's point though... Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that was I think one of your points, Scott, that it's a paraphrase it. Essentially, these things are adopted because they do something I need done and it just works. That's it. That's adoption. That's product adoption.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah I Will introduce one an additional thing and I'm one of the I'm one of those people who are you know, man of a certain age What what's what's gonna happen to our you know, I get on my Apple watch these these these limit these sound warnings at concerts I'm like, oh, it's too late. I mean, where were you freaking 25? Yeah, that's good fail. I mean like I've got it so high now I think I have to be in front of a train before even goes off, you know like
Gene Feldman: Yeah, yeah, no please.
Damon: That ship sailed, baby! You got a long ways to go before you get there, Lucky. Just trust us, it's true.
Scott Patterson: I mean, I'm, I'm reading the left. Yeah. Well, and the problem is I'm, young enough though, where I'm an, I mean, it's my problem, my ego problem, but I don't want to get hearing aids. It's like, I'm too young. It feels like you've aged into a whole other, you know, decade when you do that. I'm like, I'm, I'm holding on. I'm, I'm, I'm early in this decade. I got, you know, I got 15 years, you know, I'm like, yeah. ⁓ but I use the conversation boost on the metas.
Damon: Hahaha
Lucky Gobindram: I still got it!
Damon: ⁓
Scott Patterson: You know, and the second pair of those, the first pair were, you know, the full sunglasses. The second pair I got wise, got the transition lenses so I can wear them inside if I have my contacts and, you know, and then I've got the prescription ones. now, you know, I'll put the conversation boost on of those. I love that. And then the even realities. I think it's the even, I might be in the holidays. I'm getting some of my confused. But one of them also has, you know, a screen with the, I don't know if it's a translation ad, you can just turn on, it'll just basically close caption.
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: and then you can read the text of what people are saying and yeah I use those all the time yeah that's a huge help in a busy restaurant you know absolutely so yeah there's a use case
Lucky Gobindram: Did you get the ring, Scott, with it? Did you get the ring with it?
Scott Patterson: I didn't get the ring. No, I don't. You know, so far, the rings I have for the holiday and the mo three, think mo air pro three, they're kind of a pain in the butt to use. I don't I've not found really any good user interface on a display smart glass except maybe the even ⁓ but then even that like the touch pads weren't always don't always work for me. So but but anyway, I'll just
Lucky Gobindram: I the gestures are going to be the killer. When you start putting gestures in there and like you have the band on metal or like the Apple Watch connects to like an Apple device and it's like reading your inputs and you're able to, I think that starts closing the gap, right? And making it more natural to a user to be discreet and feel like they have a superpower and a clean interface other than where we are today.
Scott Patterson: yes i think so i think just yeah yeah Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. Like one of the things I tried with my Apple vision was the tap XR. It's that it's like a little wristband that has a little camera and captures your finger motions. So like you tap your index finger, it's an a you tap your middle finger to be and in different combinations. And so one of the things that I've been able to use with it is I can sit with my leg on my desk, on my, arm on my leg, and I can actually tap out text from it.
Scott Patterson: ⁓
Gene Feldman: The problem is it's like learning Morse code. Unless you're a Boy Scout or you really want to learn it, it is a challenge. They have a couple great onboarding game apps and stuff, but it still is kind of a challenge. to me, in the right direction.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mike Vann: for.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: Unfortunately, I think they've gotten lost in all the other noise.
Scott Patterson: Hmm.
Mike Vann: I think what's clear is that all these use cases ⁓ just make the proliferation of these glasses certain. mean, even just the most simple AI audio glasses where you can listen to a podcast, hear your messages read to you, and then make a call, that's going to get 4 billion people wearing glasses. It's going to happen.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I think so. I think the use cases are easy to see and there's enough of them that fit most people. The other thing in the United States, though, too, and I don't have data, I would love to see if anyone does have data, but it would be at least for the prescription users like us, we can use our FSA and HSA, know, health savings accounts, which are tax free for anyone, not in America. And also, you know, at least many people, when you consider like what your monthly expenses might be, it's almost like found money because we get that allotment at the beginning of our corporate year, and then it's just money that is slowly taken out of your paycheck. So it's almost like you can have, I think mine's 2,500 years, maybe 3,000 a year, and all of a sudden I have this money, and then these AI smart glasses with the prescription lenses are cool gadgets I can use to spend that money on. And so I don't know the percentage, but that is significant. My gut tells that significantly.
Damon: Mmm... Mm-hmm. You're qualified.
Lucky Gobindram: A nice little hack.
Damon: I agree, I agree, yeah.
Mike Vann: They're gonna catch up with Scott. He's got 11 pairs of glasses, you know?
Damon: hahahahah ⁓
Scott Patterson: Exactly. Yeah. Well, I think I've got nine, actually. But yeah. And how many of those did I buy with flex spending? Hopefully I won't have have appendix surgery this year now, but we'll see.
Mark G.: Yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: But it's a...
Lucky Gobindram: ⁓
Gene Feldman: The nice thing is what you guys aren't seeing is... But the nice thing is what now everybody's seeing he only wears four at one time.
Damon: Yeah, no kidding, right?
Scott Patterson: You But I'm convinced, so when I see like a non-prescription user really into it, those are the ones, frankly, between us, I'll try to do a deep dive and interview them and really understand like what's the functionality they like. And I've not found anyone so far to say the AI always on is like the big killer one. Like it's novel and it's cool and I use it a lot. ⁓
Damon: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: But I also would love if, say like on my Roka glasses, I've selected Gemini there. You can also use chat GBT, but they don't tie into my accounts. There's no memory of my overall now Gemini ecosystem of my notebooks that are now integrated. I mean, Google is just doing crazy stuff as we saw today. that's, mean, I'm getting ready to change iPhones to a Pixel. You know, if they keep going, this is amazing. But I want that history. I want it to be that.
Damon: Mm.
Scott Patterson: you know, college, you know, graduated student, know, what's that?
Lucky Gobindram: What series should have been?
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ no, I always look at it needs, it needs to have the functionality of a star Wars droid. You know, it needs to be on call ready. Cause right now to me, like the AI it's great if you're at trivia night, you know, it'll feed you the answers, you know, but like I sit here and think is that, know, if they've got cameras and this kind of gets into, ⁓ some, I, know, kind of a healthcare question, but kind of get kind of as we kind of flow through this.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. one and done. Yeah, yeah. Sure, yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: But one of the things I kind of started thinking about is, you know, for a practical use is, you know, if they could find a way, you know, like with the displays, adding spatial in there. Imagine for like a dementia patient, rather than having a house full of post-it notes, their kids could log into the account, change notes at will. And as they walk around with the glasses, they're displayed. That we start looking at that type of an assistant we need rather than, all right, I'm looking at this picture, what is it? You know what, I could have just asked the tour guide. You know, I didn't need to ask AI.
Mark G.: I mean, we've done similar things on the logistics side for last mile delivery too. Like we developed a patented thing around chirp. So it's the idea of actually using the stereo spatial speakers. My vice president is actually blind, Jim Holland. And, you know, he's somebody where, you know, when I was talking about the assistive tech, right? That's how I was introduced to him. And one of the aspects is right. Exactly what we're talking about. It's the aspect of.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ okay.
Damon: most VPs.
Mark G.: we can start building digital twins to assist the blind, assist low vision individuals so that ⁓ one, it makes their life easier. Again, it's the appeal, this functionality they didn't have, now they have. ⁓ In the low vision community, for example, ⁓ Google had a partner called Envision, and what they did is they would take the old eyeglasses and they would offer it to low vision or blind individuals.
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks
Mark G.: And the software literally would allow them to freely go to, a restaurant. Instead of asking their partner to read them the menu, they would just simply say, hey, whatever, eyeglasses, Android or whatever, what's on the menu? And it would read it back to them. The aspects also of the computer vision aspect of it, small language models, not big language models, things that can run on the device itself, where When we start seeing the coordination of, ⁓ when I go to a meeting and I'm wearing my glasses and I say, okay, take visual note of Scott, right? Associate Scott Patterson with my contacts list, right? So the next time I run my algorithm of who's in the room, right? It will tell me Scott Patterson's in the room, Mike's in the room, Gene's in the room, right? Those are where from an accessibility standpoint, things get really interesting, right? So. Those are sort of the, me as a practitioner in that space, that's where it's a really interesting platform, right? And it coincides to Scott's passion of the health, right? You know, that's the field, right? We want to assist users to make their life empowering, right? So, yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ and especially ⁓ yeah. And I spent years in a UPS doc. I would have loved to have had something that told me heavies were coming down the belt before they hit my trailer.
Mark G.: I can't talk about gene. I can't talk about those things yet.
Damon: Ha ha ha ha
Gene Feldman: As we get into, in the guarded territory.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah.
Damon: Well, Scott, Mark just opened the door on your favorite issue of health care. Do ⁓ you want to walk through that door a little bit?
Mark G.: Yeah, I have to drop guys, thanks.
Gene Feldman: You
Scott Patterson: So I'll just kick it off, Damon, though, with ⁓ understanding who the customer might be as I go through ideation for variety ⁓ of and kind of sectors. So. ⁓ you know, the first thing, at least in my kind of checklist of would ⁓ AI smart glasses be a good use case, whether it's without display or with display, I think it's important to separate those out. But anyway, the very first one, it's kind like back to the VR learning, you know, what's the best stuff to go with that. is the most important type of learning that also then has typically the biggest budgets to do something high tech like this. going to AI smart glasses, it's what do we have to have our hands free to do effectively? And using our hands could actually create a negative outcome to the person. I forget the name of the company, I have to Google it. there's a great example of this. There's somebody in the roofing industry that's made a variant the AI smart glasses for roofers. Obviously they can't be on their phones. I mean, how dangerous would that be when you're on a roof, even if you've got the safety line. And I'm not sure if they're available for sale yet, but they talk about them and you can kind of see the use case of it integrates with some major roofing system that manages compliance and kind of like end of job quality assurance. They're taking pictures of the roof after they're done. They can communicate, they can get references material off of this all hands free. whether it's healthcare or some other industry, know, where is something that is detrimental if you have to use your hands? you know, I go into things like surgical, you know, theaters, we're seeing Apple Vision Pro used in there. Could there be AI prompts, you know, without a display or probably something, you know, with AI glasses with a display that could help a surgeon in there or some of the, you
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: staff if a doctor's seeing a patient you know they pay often oftentimes doctors will pay actually human being to be that medical transcriber so they'll pay out their own pocket if they're ⁓ you know, medical group doesn't support that. So there's a lot of AI wearables taking that space. But if you just want glasses or easy off on you can still write with your pencil, pen and ⁓ anyway, you know, things like that. So I'm not going to give too much away. But those are the things the big things and like everything else is still a potential use case if people use it. ⁓ But I think the big markets to focus on commercially or to start with that first variable are
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: Do people wind up under threat of their lives if in this situation and they can't use their hands because of it? So, you know, that could also talk about EMT workers, et cetera. but there's a lot of those use cases. There's a lot of them commercially, a lot.
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: And people now have been using those at home. And now when they go to their job in the healthcare industry, ⁓ people are smart. They're already saying, well, why can't I use this here? It's like the iPhone moment we had years ago. Okay, why can I not use this cool device for work? So this whole idea of... certain companies making a consumer-only device and then they're very reluctant to make it enterprise or they don't want to release too much function on the enterprise side because they'll scare consumers. I think, that's a huge mistake. It's all one market ultimately. Enterprise typically has commercialized bigger pockets to buy them, but don't try to segregate the population because almost everybody is a consumer and an employee at the same time. ⁓ So anyway, that's one soapbox I'll get off of.
Gene Feldman: No, but it brings up a good point. mean, one of the companies I was at where I was leading the projects, we kept, we would always hit the OSHA wall. And, know, understanding that OSHA is a big driver on whether this tech can be integrated, not whether it's good. It's just integrated. And, you know, one of the things that I started realizing is, and that I would always try to argue is it can't be in now.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Gene Feldman: but that doesn't mean it won't be in at some point. it's, you know, even if you're waiting for the availability, it's important to test and figure out what you can or can't do, you know, but also understanding you are limited by other things such as OSHA, which really does can block things. Not speaking ill of OSHA, please don't come visit me guys.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Vann: Thanks.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, and like in the surgical area, there's a variety of requirements as well around the ability to clean things to a hygienic level. There's all kinds of different restrictions on almost every industry. So having somebody that knows those does help quite a bit.
Gene Feldman: Oh, absolutely. And the nice thing is you're seeing more and more companies. mean, healthcare is really where it's in some of the places that seems to be consistent, even though it's slow, but consistent growth, if I'm not misspeaking.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: I think one of the big things is that tech introduces new safety risks. I think that's the biggest thing when you're thinking about something. That's OSHA's big red flag also, Gene. I think the cool thing about this is that it doesn't, because if go full circle, this is the year VR had a bomb. This is spatial computing, sort of the way Apple repropositioned this medium.
Gene Feldman: Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: I think when we're looking at it, it's like VR falls within spatial computing. I think at this point, we're looking at convergence of these technologies and some will do better at doing both use cases and allowing you to throttle both realities. Some won't, right? Some will only be used for one or the other because they're more specialized. And you might have multiple devices if you're an average user and computing changes, right? But I think it's just like... Computing is changing, right? And I think that's what we're beginning to see more than anything, right? It's not just like VR or whatnot. think we're looking at the user base and the way they interact in general is going to change, right? And we're interested in a new OS for human interaction and human design.
Mark G.: Dan, to that point, Scott, do you see, right, like in your medical field, right, with the aspect of having these AI glasses sort of assisting you in the task that you're doing, right? Because like in the end, there's like the ethos of zero errors every time, right? Do you see a challenge with sort of the AI and its false confidence when advising users through these types of devices? Do you see any sort of issues with that?
Scott Patterson: Well, that's what I've heard from my friends that are doctors that have become my interview subjects and user personas as I write up a variety of things and use human design. ⁓ But they're already using the AI transcription maybe through a wearable or like a little mic. and they still have to double check it, but that's saving them so much time. That can just take like extra hours every day. I think if the risk reward is there, they're willing to assume more risk in their response. But ⁓
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: but it's got to be the reward there. So would it be a matter of am I looking something up like a drug interaction or something else that again has a significantly negative outcome to the patient that's high risk, risk. And then. Would that basically warrant me taking some risk in the information? I'm pretty sure, I don't know. But that is something, I think, certainly to think about, Mark. Yeah, I think you're on right track.
Mike Vann: It all seems to boil down to time and efficiency, right? Time is so valuable. And if these devices can help people, you know, cut down on these tasks, even some of the most mundane ones, but when people start to realize, wow, I just cut out, you know, four hours of my week doing transcription or taking these notes, they start to see the power and then the wheels start turning, right? What else can I do with this?
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: Thank you.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes, and what I'm hearing from mine, I'm not sure anybody else, but like, you know, there's a lot more educated patients coming in for these consults, because they've spent time on Gemini or chat GPT asking about the problem. So you know, there's this growing rift amongst patients of the AI capable that are now going in with, you know, arguably maybe college level understanding of what this what this is, that they've just got deep research, you know, coming out of a four page document.
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: with the latest medication, et cetera. And so now the doctor's also kind of challenged, but hopefully, as we've been saying a lot with AI across a variety of domains and topics, hopefully that's better because now the doctor can use their education at a higher level and be the higher level consultant versus something that maybe they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. It was just required because the patients were less educated.
Damon: Mm.
Mark G.: So it sort hints at like my wife loves WebMD and she always misdiagnoses her problems because she has access to WebMD. So yeah, so how do you solve that with AI glasses now? Yeah, I love it, love it.
Lucky Gobindram: You
Damon: you
Scott Patterson: You
Damon: Boy.
Gene Feldman: Whereas I'm on the opposite, my wife is in the healthcare field. And so sometimes I need, if she's mad at me, I need to verify that the instructions she's giving me are the correct ones.
Scott Patterson: Well, and I will say this is not related to you know, to AI smart glasses, but like perplexity now I'm on their health ⁓ function and their finance function. So I've uploaded all my financials into perplexity computer, or whatever, whatever they're calling it actually, it's not the computer. But and also my health and it goes like I've got all my Apple health from my Apple Watch and everything going through there now as well. So now maybe that is a control, you know, if I'm a hypochondriac. I start there, you know, I'm really curious about the AI health just in general that connection outside the glasses and what that's going to do.
Gene Feldman: For me, what scares me is, so years ago I used to be a high school teacher and I taught psychology. And whenever we got to abnormal behavior, I always had to give a full 16 minute lecture on, okay, we all have traits of everything. But just because you may associate, okay, you know what, because you have different moods, you do not have multiple personality disorder. You know, it was,
Scott Patterson: you
Gene Feldman: that sometimes I think people get tunnel vision and in the absence of information go straight to the worst case scenario. And I think even if we had information, we always want to look at the best, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. And I wonder if the tunnel vision, and sometimes we just joke there's arguments between doctors and patients based on information. Could, you know, me I'm on the fence of could it help or could it hinder what's what's already been the trend you know because again if it's on the internet it must be true.
Mark G.: Well, I mean, if you look at the traditional, even the VR practice that we have that's mature, right? One of the questions we always have is, will the technology create more problems than it solves? Right? I think you're kind of hitting that question, right, when it comes to practitioners approach, right? But yeah, you know, we don't want to create more problems than we're solving just by implementing a product, which I feel, specifically to the XR industry, that's a common problem. that we were doing over the years, right?
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: You're going to make everybody super confident, Mark. You know, it's the truth. I don't know. That may be a problem, right? People are already narcissistic.
Damon: Yeah. ⁓
Mark G.: Hey, have a gem on Google Gemini. Check it out.
Scott Patterson: idea. What is it?
Lucky Gobindram: It's going to literally make everybody think they're better than they are, right? Because they know all of a know more than they really know. False confidence.
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: It's the false confidence, right? It's that false confidence problem with AI.
Lucky Gobindram: 100 %
Gene Feldman: But I think there's also, but I think that on the flip side though, in learning and development, think it could flip it though. And the only reason why I say that is there was a study a couple of years ago where they did a knee procedure. In one room they had a control, which was a teacher, student, and a fake knee. In the other room they had just a person with an XR headset with an AI app that drove them through the procedure. And it showed there was like 75 % greater comprehension, you know, in less time. It was like 75 % less time for comprehension. And what they realized was it wasn't so much the technology. It was that there wasn't, were, the learner was not consistently asking for validation. They weren't going, am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? If you go to the next step, you did it right. And that actually they saw was building confidence in a learner. So that's where it's like, I agree with you, Mark, but it's like, then again, learning and development is always that unique field.
Lucky Gobindram: It's like parenting to some degree, Gene? like, as anytime, so you got some of it, you gotta let them fail. Some of it you gotta start correcting, right? There has to be a recourse there where there's like virtual manager that's seeing what you're seeing and be like, no, no, no. You know, do this this way or like, don't do that. This is gonna explode. Like, know, and like guardrails, right? ⁓
Damon: Thank
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah. Absolutely. mean like AI Glass is monitoring your task and it catches what you missed. So rather than telling you what to do, it says, stop, stop, stop, don't touch that. You know, something like that where it's that instant validation feedback. And you know, and trust me after a while we will get annoyed by it and there you get into classical conditioning.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm going present.
Scott Patterson: then we'll turn it off. But that's another great use case, industrial use case. I someone was talking about working at UPS before or, know, warehouse. Yeah. But I mean, do an SOP validation, just, you know, compliance workflow validation, you know, especially if there's a compliance need. I know if anyone's seen this lab OS that Nvidia has set up, I think with Qualcomm.
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: And they're showing display AI smart glasses and the capabilities for someone working in a lab. Tens of compliance, tons of standard operating procedures about how to do a variety of testing and for safety sake. And here we have a device that can say, ⁓ my god, hey, ⁓ red alert, change the whole color display. You just skipped a whole step and you're about to combine two chemicals that are going to end your life. ⁓ So that's a great use case. I and I see that as happening. It's like that passive camera without us even prompting, just watching what we're doing, object detection, knowing what we're doing, know, fast AI. And ⁓ then you reverse that, of course, as we both know, Gene, you can turn that into the training. This is the SOP, you know. ⁓
Damon: Hmm, well...
Scott Patterson: And I think someone was talking about Rambler maybe on a previous episode, you can just film, you know, using it and then that reverse engineers that into the whole SOP document. So, and then trains people on how to do that. all of that is again, and that's where, that's where commercial businesses are willing to spend the money to do this because it saves human lives and it's more efficient. So I think those are the easy, measurable. Thank you. Yes.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: Measurable too. Can't quantify.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Scott Patterson: quantifiable. And so pay various smart glasses for that. We've got to display it, you $800, maybe commercially, you know, 1200 if they're, you know, if they're OSHA lenses that are, you know, lab capable. And that's easy money to spend. What we say Mark?
Mark G.: I mean also from the standpoint of training. Well, the other thing is also in an operational or industrial environment, we have CT cameras running where we're required due to regulation to store the video. That's training material in a secure environment on top of what we're getting from the devices. So you're sort of developing this sort of mass ecosystem potentially for a particular operation. ⁓ And then applying or governing rules based on what the AI is seeing.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mark G.: That's a really interesting use case, right?
Scott Patterson: Yeah, you know, the one thing that I would say is, is the end user, do they ever get the feedback, you know, versus the real time feedback? So does a learning, you know, experience for them to avoid in the future versus just, you know, the AI training material, but yeah.
Mike Vann: Are those assets? Do the assets from the glasses, do we see those, that video and those assets that you're talking about, Mark, do we see those contributing to training for physical AI and robotics in the future or do we need to use headsets for that still? mean, it feels like, yeah.
Mark G.: I've got to be careful what I say, ⁓ but generally, more data usually helps the situation. ⁓ How you use data, I'm going to give you the Spider-Man speech, having the power comes responsibility speech. Companies like Anthropic and others that we've referenced have some good methods and there's others that don't. ⁓ What we do with it...
Damon: He might have to kill you.
Mike Vann: Yep.
Lucky Gobindram: Look at what the antics doing, right?
Damon: Hahaha!
Gene Feldman: You
Mark G.: really plays into it, right? ⁓ I've seen data be interpreted wrong, right? Or data works great for three months and then for whatever reason the model decides to teach you to do something totally different. What was the cause of that? Maybe prompt injection by a user, right? And there wasn't guardrails that were properly placed, or maybe the model or method that you were using had a certain issue with it, right? ⁓ Who knows? Data has to be sustainable. That's the other thing, right? ⁓ And something like AI glasses or this framework we're talking about, right? There's a lot of challenges in that when the model changes every three months, right? As an integrator, as a developer, how do you handle that, right? It's a huge challenge. ⁓ So yeah.
Damon: Alright.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. And especially when the, right now we're going through the rebuilding year. So as steam gets lost, you know, the teams get cut, the projects get cut, you know, it, it sets us back, but I don't think people also realize how far it us back. Cause then we almost have to start from scratch all over again, once it builds back up and it makes it really hard to stay the long course. And it's one of the things that I think we've all. seen is that VR has had more false starts than any technology I think that exists out there.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mark G.: I think that gives us experience in the AI space. I don't know how many times I've heard stories that, boy, does it smell like XR from the hype cycle or whatever else.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely! Well, it goes back to the old thing about Edison. ⁓ People don't remember the 999 times he failed. They only remember the one time he stole from Tesla.
Scott Patterson: Ha ha!
Damon: Nice, nice. Well, Gene, we've got... No, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. You're the guest. Go ahead.
Scott Patterson: I do worry though, you go ahead Damon, sorry. I do worry just the organizational, the domain knowledge within the industry as more people getting laid off and then fully pivoting to AI so they can make their mortgage. I mean, you know, there's the amount of the pool of jobs available in XR as an industry is obviously shrinking and it continues to shrink. I, you know, I, feel like we are an industry that often eats our young, you know, what we'll have big platform providers. big chipset providers kick off. don't want to name names, kick off a program, off a whole new operating system, get everyone, get a whole bunch of ISVs involved. And then at the last minute, you know, it doesn't work out or, Hey, we're the biggest provider of HMDs and let's, let's make this whole program so that we can, you know, do so and so. then after millions are invested, then that goes, and then the whole team is laid off. then, you know, so it's
Damon: No, I know, I know. You
Scott Patterson: It is a concern because if you are a believer in the technology and especially at that intersection of AI and these concepts around, know, XR being the user interface for AI and especially we can certainly see that I think with, know, the wearables and AI smart glasses, you know, I would say that that is the best. I'm not going to pull my phone out to ask AI a question. I do if it's a big deal. But if I have glasses on, I'm talking to it all the time. I think in passively see what I'm doing and give me that human performance feedback. mean, that's just amazing utility for AI. It's using it to its fullest and allowing the agency of AI and human interaction to be fully realized. So if you believe in those things, then the medium term will be very profitable. But at the end of the day, how many people will still be left here?
Lucky Gobindram: .
Scott Patterson: won't be retired and won't be, you know, in a different industry.
Mark G.: Who's gonna buy the product? That's the question, right? Is there gonna be enough people around to buy the product and not be disenchanted by the product in the process?
Damon: Wow.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah. as well as I think some of the companies realizing that there is collateral damage when they make these decisions. ⁓ I mean, like I remember three years ago, the number one field to get into was 3D asset building. It was getting into all of that architecture and all of that. Even my son was a design.
Scott Patterson: Well. I don't think they do. I wish they did though, Gene. They don't. They don't.
Damon: Yeah, I agree. They do not. They do not. I agree with Scott. Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: Hehehe
Damon: That ship sailed.
Lucky Gobindram: Mm.
Gene Feldman: got his degree in design, digital, or design, graphic design. No, I don't, I did not give, I don't have children that are accountants. I am not capable of that. Yeah.
Mark G.: I thought you were going to say accounting.
Scott Patterson: Hahaha!
Damon: hahahahah ⁓
Scott Patterson: It's impossible for you to build that type of a human being, right?
Lucky Gobindram: You
Damon: You know what they say about accounting, right? CPA now stands for ⁓ Claude Prompting Acuity.
Scott Patterson: Ha ha.
Gene Feldman: Nice. ⁓ so with my son and they talking that, you know, the 3d asset building, all of that for AR XR that's there was such a drive for it. But now we just watched a thousand animator digital animators get laid off from a very big company that, ⁓ and you've got unity light where, or mesh sheet.
Damon: Yes.
Gene Feldman: these companies that can design 3D assets based on AI. So all these kids that are just now finishing their career are already out of job.
Damon: Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: Or they gotta change their workflows. They gotta be AI whisperers in addition to what they have. They gotta adopt and change their times. I don't think the jobs disappear. I think the jobs change. Skills are parallel. How they apply those skills is different, right?
Damon: Yeah, they're getting their certifications. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Damon: That's right. That's exactly what happened with graphic design back in the day, right? Instead of using Xacto knives and paste, they switched over to digital. The same thing will happen here. The professionals will still be there. They just change their workflow.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm sure they were like, fuck Photoshop back then. They're like, we're not gonna, we'd rather cut it out and put it instead, glue it to a piece of paper and make it, make this in a physical, packed-out way, right?
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Damon: Absolutely. ⁓ yeah, yeah, we remember all those arguments.
Gene Feldman: But to be fair, yeah, but to be fair, I would love Print Shop back. That was the easiest one to ever use.
Damon: ⁓ wow, I haven't heard that in a long time.
Lucky Gobindram: BLEH!
Scott Patterson: thought you were going to say, corrupt role. ⁓ my god.
Gene Feldman: Hahahaha!
Lucky Gobindram: Gold is gold, but not necessarily efficient, right? We want to create a bigger the ability to do more.
Gene Feldman: Hahaha!
Damon: For those of you listening, get the AI to look that one up for you. That's really reaching back.
Scott Patterson: Yes, it's probably vibe coded, you know.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. I think I still have a book back here somewhere from it.
Damon: That's going back to page maker. ⁓
Gene Feldman: Or don't forget Dreamweaver. That was always a fun one.
Damon: ⁓ That was a good one.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ yeah, that was a moment. That was a moment though. mean that Dreamweaver was revolutionary. I mean come on, that was revolutionary. Yeah, props.
Damon: It was, it really was, yeah. And aptly named for its day, for its day. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ it, it, yeah, unfortunately. Absolutely. All right. Well, we're almost out of time. So I want I want to be conscious of our time in our listeners time. ⁓ So, Scott, one of the things that we actually ask is is kind of the last protocol that if there was something that somebody was getting into this space or somebody listening that has questions, what's a piece of advice that you would want to share with them as they either start or continue their journey in this space?
Scott Patterson: That's a good question. mean, XR is a very small industry. And I think if you do plan on trying to make this your career, you know, for a decade or longer, it's really going to be who you know, that's going to help you pivot and change. And that includes, you know, having a mentor, I mentor people, if you find me on LinkedIn, want to mentor, happy to mentor you, I might tell you to run. So I don't know. There's a lot of people being laid off right now. I mean, ⁓ it's very tough. I would want to know what your vision is ultimately. What's your vision in XR that you want to help build toward? ⁓ So I think having a mentor and I also think just in general going to things like AWE, know, just go if you're a student, I believe they have a student, you know, discount rate. I think they also have what do we call them? You know, basically, if you if you're if you don't have the funds, I think there are scholarships, I think as well. Like just go join VRA, are joined different things to connect with the community because it's really going to be. It's a very nascent technology. We are dealing with a dramatic reduction in the amount of investment dollars in the industry. And if you want to be in the industry, you're going to have to be really creative and make sure you can pay your rent. And we want you to have a stable job with the right people. And it's also good to understand a lot of different elements to it. mean, really, it's such a nascent technology. There's so much we can still do with this.
Damon: Yes.
Scott Patterson: outside of just AR, but AR with content creation. I mean, I'm still a big believer in, know, we're be able to put a VR headset on and have. you know, project holodeck, can tell it go pull, you know, the Sherlock Holmes public domain, you know, hounds of the Baskervilles, like that old Star Trek Next Generation, you know, major myself, but you know, like stuff like that, just amazing. There's a whole bunch of cool stuff that we can do. ⁓ So that would be my advice. Find a mentor, multiple mentors and be part of the community. It's not a good industry. If you're an introvert, that's going to stay at home all the time, you need to force yourself. to connect with industry groups and find people.
Damon: Bingo. Yep. Well said. Well said. Good job, Yeah. Awesome. Where's that applause icon? Applause. Applause.
Gene Feldman: No, absolutely. I completely agree. We are, we are a living example of it. Absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Mike Vann: Thank
Scott Patterson: I mean, really, if it was my nieces and nephews, I would tell them probably to avoid the industry. mean, you know, like, really, I mean, that's the truth. If it's just someone, I'm gonna go to college, what should I do? If your plan is to, you know, what's your plan? If your plan is to make a lot of money, you go to where the money is, you go into finance. If your plan is to, hey, I don't care about money, you know, I'm an art, whatever, you know. So for whatever reason, this is industry that speaks to me.
Damon: ⁓ Don't do this
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: and I'm stuck here whether they like it or not. So there's already a gauntlet, a multiple gauntlet someone will have gone through at this point, coming out of XR program at Northeastern or whatever and probably X amount of dollars in loans and I want you to be able to pay those loans on.
Gene Feldman: It-
Damon: The way Mike is smiling, I think he feels your pain on that.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. Ehhuh
Mike Vann: I listen I it's so true we've all lived it but you know we all need to we're pivoting right now and merging AI and XR and it's working so just learn AI and how you can leverage it.
Damon: you Ha ha!
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Just go with it, baby, go with it, yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, I've learned it's just you develop Stockholm syndrome to your career.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes.
Mark G.: Yeah, my first question to all the interns is, are you crazy? You know, we're actually wanting to do this. I'll tell you right now, if I was saying I would have left this field a long time ago.
Damon: If you are, maybe you're in the right place.
Gene Feldman: Hehehehehe
Mike Vann: If you're crazy, this is the right place for you.
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. We, but then again, we're the dreamers and believers as Willy Wonka would say, or Jim Henson.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ think Jim Henson, I you were going into that. Very similar, very similar minds. Yes. Come at the frog. Yeah. Yeah.
Damon: I thought, yeah, I thought he was going to, yeah.
Gene Feldman: or was Kermit the Frog. There we go. I'll go with that. ⁓ but seriously, Scott, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation has been absolutely awesome. And if you ever want to come back, if you ever have anything that you want to share or any updates, or you just want to be part of the panel for a week or two, the seat, it will always be open for you, my friend. All you gotta do is reach out and let me know. I don't want to end date you with invites, but if you want to.
Damon: Yee-hoo!
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Scott Patterson: Thank you guys. I really enjoyed it. ⁓ thank you.
Damon: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: I would be more than happy to send your way.
Scott Patterson: I would love that. really enjoyed this. This is the best of the XR industry. Go ahead, Mike.
Mark G.: ever ⁓ we gotta ask Scott the question Scott Scott what would be what what
Damon: Awesome.
Gene Feldman: He said we're the best! First, I just wanna make sure that's on tape. He said we're the best!
Damon: You got that in recording, right? Right?
Scott Patterson: ⁓ This isn't though. It's really this ideation. Like this is the thing. It's full of super smart people that are all visionary that normal people, our mothers and fathers, if we're still alive, our siblings, our children, probably think we're a bunch of weirdos and this very esoteric thing. And we probably are because we're creating, developing controlled hallucinations that you can stick on this base computer and go into.
Damon: Aww.
Mike Vann: Very true.
Scott Patterson: what is that about exactly, but we like it and we see value in it. There's a lot of service to humanity that it can do. when I, this to me is when we make cool things together. So like we should just do a hackathon.
Damon: Man. I'm so glad this is still recording. This is great.
Scott Patterson: I would love to hear their opinion though of just AI and human interaction and why that an alternative viewpoint to AI smart glasses being the best way to do that. I mean, so many people have left.
Mark G.: Cool. Someone that would argue the AI glasses are just going to make you dumber.
Damon: or... or they're a fad or...
Gene Feldman: hahahahah
Scott Patterson: Well, I think we can find a lot of people will say that because it's just the same. It's the same trope every time the smartphone, you know, we just got every technology that's been released. That was an argument, obviously, for, you know, same with the privacy issues, you know, ⁓ my God, there's a camera now. I'm going to be film doing something. I don't know. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Okay. But it's hard to debate the value, Numbers don't lie. thing is, VR was, people were trying to put a square and a peg, right? Because some people that loved it, I love it. And there is some value, but there's also a whole other side that's counterbalancing all the value that you can create with it, right? So I think it's like, things that keep you in the real world, where you are, and add value to your real world, it's hard to like...
Damon: Yeah. I love it. Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: They're actually almost less intrusive than the mobile phone or tablet or another device that we're giving people in the field to do things because your hands are locked up, right? And you're also face down in it. So.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Well, you're also unlocking that money the way, know, remember Scott brought that point up earlier FHA HSA, you know, those medical dollars, when that unlocked for AR glasses, bang, that unlocked the, I know there's gotta be data out there. There's gotta be marketing data on that.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ especially as they increase its usage, I can see it being reclassified as durable medical equipment. It's not just for seeing, they're not just prescription eyeglasses. And once it becomes durable medical equipment,
Lucky Gobindram: I don't need to somebody lobbying for that ASAP. They're not. I'm sure they are.
Damon: Yep, you bet. Yep. That's a idea. Yeah, they sure do. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Vann: ⁓ it's happening.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, but the thing is almost all insurance companies cover durable medical equipment at 100%.
Scott Patterson: Wow, totally. Especially if you remember Divergence. Yeah, yeah, especially if you have no divergence, know, ADHD or autism or something else that could be that we have a proven solution for in some way learning disability, it can reach you, you know, through the audio. I mean, there's I think you're onto something there, Gene, for sure.
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Damon: Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: I wonder if somebody's ever tried that in like a classroom, right, with like children or like ADHD that are wearing glasses versus children are not, like a dual test, right?
Damon: Surely they have. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: I can tell you as a teacher with young children with ADD, you're not getting anything done.
Lucky Gobindram: it.
Damon: Unless, unless you have some one-on-one.
Gene Feldman: They're running around like crazy. Yeah, I mean, but I could tell you, you know, I mean, most public schools now they are, there has been a push for XR and VR and a lot of this tech in schools because what they're actually starting to see is just kind of going back to Scott's point, you know, like in history, being able to relive historical events, being like world geography, being able to travel.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah, retention is so much better in those cases, without a doubt.
Damon: Yeah, like Bob Stone was ticket. Yeah. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: And I'm a firm believer that there hasn't been as big a revolution in education since Socrates first asked why. and why I say that is because when you get into actual education, it's you need a consistent, repetitive and safe environment. know, and VR gives you that each and every time and it's a consistency that each learner gets the exact same story. Sorry, I get,
Damon: HAHAHAHA To which Alexander the Great said, why not? Hmm.
Gene Feldman: on my soapbox now.
Damon: That's okay.
Scott Patterson: I mean, it has revolutionized learning for sure. That's where I came from. that's, you know, if we're looking for the industry to continue to grow in a bad time, we should continue to focus on more use cases related to that because that's the surefire draw, you know.
Gene Feldman: I mean, like watching what Conveya and Dialogue Trainer and ⁓ Virtual Speech have been doing. It's just been incredible. I think one of the keys that's really been successful for them is that their user interface, you don't need to be us to create these courses. Anybody can do it.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, yeah, back to the onboarding. Yes, exactly. Back to the onboarding conversation and I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with Sophie from virtual. ⁓ the virtual speech. Thank you. Yeah, just sort of bring it further myself. Virtual speech. And she's got a great story because I was doing volunteer work for the MIT hackathon.
Gene Feldman: Virtual Speech.
Scott Patterson: And anyway, she helped me as one of the user personas or something we were working on. Virtual speech was kind of an accidental business. It was an accidental startup. was really just Dom created that app for her to practice. And then it became this whole, so it's a great origin story for that business. I would get her on. And then they've done a lot of cool stuff with AI as well. And they could talk about kind of, you know, productizing AI to increase, you know, ⁓ capability that she's, and she's a lovely, she's just awesome.
Damon: ⁓ huh. Brilliant. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Damon: Okay, that sounds good. That sounds real good.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. I mean, yeah. And we've actually had the pleasure of watching Lucky grow his business in this field. You know, ⁓ watching him and what him and his brother have been doing throughout this and the results. Lucky, I'm stealing your thunder. I'm sorry, my friend. That's what I do, man. But ⁓ absolutely. But some of the insights.
Lucky Gobindram: Nice ship. It's okay.
Damon: Haha!
Scott Patterson: for that.
Damon: It's all free PR.
Gene Feldman: that Lucky and his brother have actually been able to glean from this and share. It's just, it's really giving us a great idea of what potential could come next in this field. So.
Mark G.: Hey, Hey, Scott. Last question. Really last question. Do you remember your eureka moment when it came to VR or AR? There was that one first time experience where it was just like, this is the drug. This is the hook. Do you remember that?
Damon: Really, really, really, really, really.
Gene Feldman: Hahahaha
Damon: Amen.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I mean literally is it was DK one it was literally taken that that thank you at Palmer Lucky taking that box out it was like 640 40 screens weren't they the very first DK one like it was just ridiculously low res. God I don't even know what was the frame frame or was the it was like 35. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean like it was just I forget. Yeah, I forget what we had for like
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks for watching. Yeah Plug it into the PC. Get your little sensor set up so you have your whole boundary. Try not to knock that shit over.
Scott Patterson: demos even back then, but it was just minimal. It was just, you could see it. That was the moment. I mean, I would say probably the second big moment, Mark, is ⁓ working at a big four consulting firm, owning our internal VR learning strategy, training our partners on leadership skills and seeing these very intense, basically like VPs in a corporation go into VR. I would, to your earlier point, I would spend 30 minutes onboarding them before we did any training as a whole separate session. So they knew how to operate, control everything, use the headset. That was definitely a ⁓ requirement for success, critical success factor. But I would see them be like kids, 50, 60 year old, plus folks that have very intense jobs, constantly stressed out, dealing with huge budgets and responsible for hundreds of people's employment and big clients. And here I am seeing them so overwhelmed by this cool experience that they had become six year olds in front of my face and been completely vulnerable. And then, and so that moment of them getting it and seeing how cool it is, and then talking to them six weeks later, if they've gone through the program, and had all this amazing interactive, multi collaborative and self study, learn, you know, learning happening, and them validating the effectiveness of it like that is, that's a hard audience to impress. And that was the other thing. As far as AR, I think we're still there. But I'm so glad, I think it's still to come. But I'm so glad that the AI smart glass revolution is building AI AR faster than we previously anticipated. Three years ago in the metaverse hype cycle, I never would have anticipated AR. There's always ARs coming in seven years at that level. Not that we have AR HUD displays or not AR in my mind, but anyway, I think that's yet to come.
Damon: you but it's mainstream enough now that even my wife is looking at buying one. And I don't want to frame up exactly for you what that means. I'll just let the implication lie there.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Gene Feldman: Well, but you gotta look at it. mean, it's been what, less than a year since the displays hit and really this kind of, I mean, and what, two years for the, I think the metas themselves. So it's been really a very quick turnaround on this.
Damon: You
Mike Vann: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Damon: Yeah, relatively speaking, yeah. Well, let's wait to see what happens in 2029 when Skynet goes live.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, and at
Scott Patterson: What?
Gene Feldman: Nah, it's not.
Mark G.: Yeah, no, I'm making a prediction. We're going to get AI backlash. You're going to get a lot of people just like VR when it was 2014, where there's such a hype and big, big money is going to spend big money. I hate to say it, but it'll probably kick us to a recession because so much is being betted on this that people are going to get tired of it. And it's going to be a case where it just doesn't perform well.
Scott Patterson: Bye.
Damon: Nah, I'm gonna disagree. Nah, I'm gonna disagree. Nah. They're already tired of it. They've already passed that. They've already passed that. And then we went to the next level. And now we say there's another bubble. And then we went to the next level. And then we say it's dead-ended on the connectivity and the, know, what could it possibly provide next? And then we went to the next level. No, we're nowhere clear. We're nowhere clear.
Scott Patterson: I agree with Damon actually. I mean, I think I do agree with you, Mark, and that like we're seeing the social cues, you know, who was it that I forget he was a ex ex Google ex alphabet CEO to the commencement speech recently for some and people are booing as he's talking about AI hit the news, you know, it's out there on Reddit to first page. So there's like the some human element of kickback. But I think I think Damon said I mean, as far as investment and venture capital dollars, I mean my retirement's bet on Nvidia. ⁓ mean, it's got, yeah, I mean, we've got a huge runway, like all the use cases, all the low hanging fruit in AI has either been touched. mean, they're like, you know, I think there's a long way to go. I do think we could see, especially younger generation, like, you know, like some kind of either hopefully nonviolent or potentially.
Mike Vann: Thank
Mark G.: Hey man, last quarter it- it- 46 % up. So I totally get it, you know? I totally get it.
Damon: Hahaha! Yeah. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: destruction of data centers or some kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the social element is still there, but I think as people see, ⁓ my God, cancer is now solved for the type of cancer my grandma had. I don't think anyone can deny or will be able to the positive. So it's an interesting time to be alive.
Mark G.: We're already seeing like the food robots on the west coast and tipped over and stuff, but you know
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of those positives are going to fade into the background fabric of technology. won't be, it won't be obvious to people that AI is the thing. It'll just be that stuff works.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: They might want to make sure that people know that because I do think the negatives are going to be bigger negatives too.
Damon: Well, there's some grassroots efforts from ⁓ our global competitors to generate even more negatives. know, that's a thing too. Global competition is high when this much money is on the line. Man, ⁓ some people get really intense.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. And I would argue damn it's more than money. I mean, this is a world dominant dominance. So if we're still stuck, if we cannot get to a place of abundance where we're no longer fighting for resources amongst geopolitical entities, I mean, hopefully we can. You know, this is stupid. We're still Neanderthals. Like this is dumb, you know, but come on, we don't need to have enemies and nuclear bombs anymore. I come on, this is all. But as long as we do, you know, like, like it's, it's, it's actually, you know, geopolitical.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. I really do.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah.
Damon: I agree, yeah.
Scott Patterson: This is world dominance.
Damon: This is, yeah. Yeah, it really is. So is that the final protocol, Gene? Is that it?
Scott Patterson: I could go forever.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ no. mean, and the thing is almost, yeah, I think it will be because the only thing I was going to bring up was going to be the argument over we're arguing whether AI is going to take over the world. If they can't get the data centers built, it's never going to happen.
Damon: Ha
Mark G.: Well, it's not sustainable. We already know it's not sustainable.
Scott Patterson: Elon's going for the sky though. It's gonna be, it's gonna be even worse. Put him in orbit, it's terrifying. Then we're really talking about Terminator, right? God, can you imagine? Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: putting them in the clouds
Damon: It'll be fine. Yeah, put it in the cloud, put it in orbit, they'll figure it out.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. I know. Alright out.
Mike Vann: And maybe we bring someone in on one of these episodes that's tied into the space industry. That might be interesting. There might be something there.
Damon: That would be fascinating that really would
Gene Feldman: Yeah, in 20 years there'll be a board cube just orbiting Earth. That's our entire internet.
Scott Patterson: That might be good, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, no, I'm yeah. How many, how many more starlings is SpaceX because they're getting ready to IPO. I thought I'd have like 10 times more starling satellites and like two years or something. I mean, it's just going to be, and then our phones, I don't know if you've watched in cellular, but like all the phones will connect into the, the LAOs, you know, so your starling will become a phone provider. So, you know, which is. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: edit Yeah.
Damon: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I won't need all these towers around me. It's just going to be going. Hey, let's instead of a instead of a Borg cube gene, let's make it a Borg sphere. We'll call it Moonbase Alpha and we'll put it on the moon.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, exactly.
Gene Feldman: I love it. But all right now I have is the Riddler from Batman and Robin that we're all going to be porting the brain with straight into our brains.
Damon: You You That's true, that's already true. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: How do you know that hasn't already happened, Lucky? And you're just laying in a cot somewhere, in a little pod, in the Matrix. And the rest of us are not real.
Scott Patterson: Hahaha!
Gene Feldman: All right. All right. Now that now that we're at a point where now that we're at the point of questioning whether we're actually in the matrix, I think ⁓ we have hit the gambit as well as we.
Mike Vann: and end the thing.
Damon: Maximum, maximum geek level!
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. And we have, and we've also thrown in for those of you not from the Midwest, a traditional Midwestern goodbye. We say goodbye about four times before it actually is over.
Damon: You
Mike Vann: Nice work, Gene.
Gene Feldman: So, so everybody, thank you for listening. Scott, thank you for joining the protocol team. Thank you for joining. And please, if you enjoyed the episode, subscribe on YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify. And we look forward to seeing you on the next protocol. Thank you guys.
Scott Patterson: Thank you.
Damon: Thank you all. Bye bye. Thanks, Scott. Bye bye.
Mark G.: Cheers guys, good luck.
Scott Patterson: Thanks everybody.
Mike Vann: Thanks, Scott.
Scott Patterson: Okay. Sure. Yeah, thanks so much for having me everybody and thanks Gene. Yeah, so a little bit about me, know, my XR journey and I don't think we even knew it was going to be XR at the time. My VR journey though certainly started in 2014 with the Oculus Dev1. DevKit, you know, one off Kickstarter. So I was working in learning technology at the time and really once the technology matured enough to really be used for VR learning, introduced a large VR learning program at the firm that I was working at for our internal users and led that effort and then started getting into a few other kind of enterprise VR use cases and now certainly XR use cases. So I'm very much enterprise focused. you know, if you got any questions that come from the VR learning background, which of course is still one of the biggest enterprise, you know, use cases for VR. I'm especially excited though at the intersection of XR and AI, you know, I mean, obviously AI came in as the metaverse hype cycle was crashing as we all predicted.
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks
Scott Patterson: And that's really taken the center stage for all venture capital, et cetera. But there's tons of amazing use cases for XR still, and certainly at the intersection of AI. And that's one of the things that I'm a big promoter of as well, is always use the technology and frankly the venture capital and the consumer and commercial markets that are hungry for it and intersect that with our industry. And what can we mix when we have those ingredients in the kitchen. a little bit about me, but yeah, I would say I'm super excited about the AI smart glasses and watching that space very heavily on both on the consumer and the commercial side. I think this is going to be the year and I'm a little bit of anyone disagrees, but it certainly seems like this is going to be the year for the AI smart glasses, you know.
Gene Feldman: It really is shaping it that way. mean, I've been watching the Evan G1 or Evan realities G1s and at first it was, it was, it was neat. had some really good features, but you're watching it really put a kind of grow and almost start playing it down and what Meta has been doing.
Scott Patterson: Yes, yes. I, and you and I have got, I think I've got eight pairs over here right now. I'm a natural eyeglass wearer like you. I've got contacts in right now, but it looks like four five of us are eyeglass wearers. So why not have, you know, expanded human performance if I have to wear these anyway at zero positive of user friction, you know?
Damon: Hmm.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. Especially, especially one of the things I like is they added a lot of features that make it relevant. So I, I w like you, I came from, I'm in the learning and development space. And one of the, one of the biggest features that I thought was, was so great is the, ⁓ teleprompter. You know, that how many people suffer from the fear of public speaking. mean, I would watch brand new, like business analysts having to speak to the C-suite and they have no experience.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah, absolutely.
Damon: I never understood that. Never understood that.
Scott Patterson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And it's and it's one of like, I think it's a top three fear. It's like right below death and divorce or something. I mean, it's really high up there. It's some crazy number of people are terrified, like literally near panic attack level. So absolutely. What a great benefit of humanity just in that alone. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. ⁓ yeah, absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm so excited. just bought a pair of G1s. I haven't gotten them yet, but I'm excited. It's going amazing.
Damon: They're on their way.
Scott Patterson: They're great. They're great. And the interesting thing about the G1 is lucky too is, you know, there's no camera. So we're getting into this space, you know, there's some public reaction. back to the whole glass hole era. we're seeing that. I've noticed that when I'm wearing mine, because I've got prescription lenses. I've got multiple pairs of the Metare band. So with my prescription lens clear, I'll just wear everywhere, of course. But enough people are onto them that I do occasionally get a reaction. And I'm just terrified, because I'm so blind, that somebody somewhere will make me take them off, and I can't see. And I don't have a pair of backup prescriptions with me. But I think the interest of
Gene Feldman: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: about the evens is there's no camera so you get a lot of function I plus you get the wave guide you get the text which is so much faster for an output method for us to process then you're not scaring anybody with the cameras so they don't even know you know you're wearing them
Mike Vann: So this is audio, but I have the events and the little clip-ons, which are actually really, really ⁓ nice. So these guys have picked a lane and they're really good at it. And I think ⁓ that company is just going to continue to grow. And Scott, you probably agree, they look really interesting. ⁓ But I think you're going to see a lot of competition doing exactly what these guys are doing.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Damon: Wow.
Gene Feldman: apps. Yeah. And I mean, I think where they also hit the mark is the interface. The user interface is friendly, you know, cause one of the things, and Mike, I know you can attest to cause you have a pair of the displays and not to get into this whole comparison. Sorry. What you guys aren't seeing is Mark is showing, is doing his show and tell of showing off all of his fancy glasses now.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mike Vann: Yep, idea.
Damon: He's
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: Yeah, I was also going to mention the... I really actually like the Rokid displays. You know, for their stereoscopic, not monoscopic. People really don't notice it. I mean, there's one camera, right? And I feel when they first launched, it was a little rocky, kind of like HTC usually does, you know? But now, as a developer, I'm...
Mike Vann: There you go.
Scott Patterson: So it's raining in it. ⁓ I do too. Yeah.
Mike Vann: Yeah, that's what I've heard. I haven't seen those.
Damon: ⁓ really? Ha ha ha!
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah.
Mark G.: kind of thinking it's pretty cool, right? It has a lot of the same features as the meta and also, you know, your teleprompter app. I'm also digging the fact that you can control what models you put on it. And also, they have a cool thing called dual link, where they have like something like 60 languages that in real time, you're getting both. Say I do English in Mandarin or I do English in Vietnamese or I have a friend of mine who's Greek. Right. He did Greek and English, right. You know, and it was the fact that through that chip and tethering it with the phone, right. You really get sort of what I call traditionally, right. The accessibility technology, the assistive tech capability of it. ⁓ you know, and for me, that's where I'm really excited on the enterprise side. Right. ⁓ we're looking at, you know, cause I work for big Brown, we're looking at tools where a supervisor can understand Haitian.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mark G.: Right. ⁓ And if he has, or she has a platform where they can better communicate with, you know, the employees, right. That's a gold mine. Right. ⁓ So it's a case where, you know, that aspect of the AI glasses is really cool. For me, I generally like the idea of display functionality because you don't need AR superpowers, right. But to have something like a HUD or have something where I can highlight what the camera's seeing. Assistively, you know from an operations standpoint is really exciting and I'm seeing like the devices you guys mentioned plus a bunch of others plus some that I can't talk about right We're really seeing this movement towards that low power green display for a lot of different platforms now, which is really interesting sort of Scott I'm sure you remember right it was the Informational reality spin on the wearables, right? It was HUD's
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mark G.: combined with the devices, I kind of feel like we're sort of starting to loop back into that phase, right? So.
Gene Feldman: I agree. mean like I always look at because I was a big space top fanatic when space top came out I absolutely love it I think it's still a great tool because the thing I liked about it is I can it's my PC It's whatever's on my PC gets I don't I don't need anything special except the license their software, but I know space top the past 12 months have been kind of they've had a lot of changes so you know, so it's looking at what's coming next, but One of the things that I've looked at as I'm a big motorcycle enthusiast and a hut, mean, realizing there's a tapped in market of people, of where a HUD makes perfect sense. You know, like I've talked to, you know, several of the companies, like through even and all that and saying, once it's available on my motorcycle, then you know, it's completely ready. You know, because it, you know, and even with other activities, like I, one of the things I've always watched too is if you watch action sports,
Damon: Hmph.
Gene Feldman: They're starting to get some really interesting HUD displays in ski glasses and swimming glasses.
Damon: Hmph. Hmph.
Gene Feldman: or swimming goggles.
Damon: We knew which man.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ that would be interesting. Yeah. Well, and I'm a fan of the HUD because frankly, you know, we start looking at input output models, human interaction, you know, I could first of all see some real great utility for hand gesture, you know, recognition at some point without the EMG band. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Good.
Scott Patterson: Because, but the input being audio, for the most part, like I can speak and get what I want fairly quickly and I'm patient with myself in that, but I'm not patient for technology returning results in a very slow method for me to then process. So. you know, the AI audio glasses only, you know, I have a lot of use cases and I don't want to undersell those because there's so much stuff we can do with those, you know, but I love having the green screen just so can read the results because I can obviously read way faster than I can listen just like everybody can. And I can get a much ⁓ greater level of detail around that too. ⁓ I'm a big fan of having a lot of output and quick processing of the output coming off of these.
Lucky Gobindram: Thank
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely.
Scott Patterson: My kind of longer term vision is for the enterprise or consumer, it's really the same. And it's kind of hinted at in what we're seeing in the rumored Apple AI glasses coming, display lists, is distinguished between with displays and without. But it's fascinating when you release the rumors that one of, have two cameras on each temple, but one is a lower res kind of ambient always on camera. just to have ambient intelligence around the environmental and perhaps other things. Perhaps it's gonna watch me at the gym, be able to recognize what equipment I'm on and then do something with Apple Health. So to me, even the medium term vision is the ability to provide human support. for whatever performance we're doing, whatever act we're doing at the time of need. whether I'm sitting here on my Mac, and I forget how to use the auto some on Excel, and Siri through the glasses sees I'm struggling with that and just takes over and makes a shortcut just takes a mouse away from me and does it like a robotic process automation. Why couldn't they do that they own all the back end hooks of all the operating systems, you know, so, so I think that kind of concept both at a probably a hint level all the way to a let me just you're just going to be the human like back to the claw bot thing a few weeks ago looking for humans to just be the human in in IRL to do a task for AI you know so I could I could be onboarded into a new job and and basically 10 minutes sign the paperwork put the glasses on I'm on the factory floor and I'm just going through the motions that it's directing me to do you know for the first few days so
Gene Feldman: You
Scott Patterson: ⁓ But that idea goes pretty deep and wide about whatever type of performance we could be doing. And I think that the glasses are really the most intuitive and the easiest wearable to do that. that's why we're seeing so much ⁓ revenue out there, seeing really every company in the XR pivot to include this in their portfolios. Yeah.
Mark G.: Hey Scott, quick question. Do you feel there's sort of in maybe in the last year or so, sort of a divergence in hardware, right? From sort of that high performance XR device now to sort of what we'd call like a low cost, low security sort of platform. Are you seeing that or am I totally off?
Scott Patterson: in the kind of the wearables or AI smart glasses space or XR HMDs ⁓ or AR. Tell me more. Because I think we're following the consumers. I think ultimately the consumers are in charge right now. They're not buying VR headsets as we know, according to last couple quarters of statistics. That's pretty flat. ⁓
Damon: Hahaha!
Scott Patterson: Meta has, you know, stopped subsidizing them as much as they did for their MR headsets. You know, there's a price increase in the consumer side. I'm trying to make sure everything I'm saying is public knowledge, but I'm pretty sure it's public knowledge that they stopped all the computer skews as well. They stopped the enterprise skews, right? Yeah, yeah. They stopped the enterprise skew, though. That's public knowledge, I think, at this point. So they no longer sell, know, just a few skews, which is probably
Lucky Gobindram: Hahahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: Totally relate, Scott, totally relate the problem, yeah.
Damon: Ha ha ha.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: for the best. They did not surface MDM hooks in the OS across all the devices and then just allow MDM providers to hook into that like on an iPhone. ⁓ So we'll see what their longer term plan is for that besides making their MDM free. But anyway, yeah, I think it depends on what you're looking at. I don't think that the XR market mark is really that. I think we have the luxury of being long term strategists. It's really just reactive. mean, to be, I would love to meet someone that could argue that point against it. And I'm wrong all the time. But I mean, like to have an idea of what the hardware might be in the next three years, and devote significant amount of money to that, I think would be a mistake right now. And I think people who did that three years ago are out of business right now.
Mark G.: So let's flip it then. So do you think maybe then the acceptance of adoption of AI glasses is more around the onboarding experience versus something like XR?
Scott Patterson: why again, I think most people, first of all, you kind of, you know, ⁓ gave a little hint there and that's, don't think most people consider AI smart glasses XR. I think we do in the industry and certainly all the supply chain is coming from, from us, you know. ⁓ but I think more and more, if that takes off as its own category and matures over, you years, I think more and more of that will become more distinct and more of it's still wearable category. ⁓ What was your question again?
Mark G.: So do you feel the appeal of, well, as practitioners of XR, one of the big challenges we always had to deal with was the onboarding process. Things have always gotten better. But with specifically AI glasses, maybe you want to talk about, or do you agree that I feel one of the reasons why you're seeing such a rapid adoption and acceptance to it is the onboard experience is way better than something like XR.
Scott Patterson: to use it. Yes, yes, yes. 100 % agree. Now I understand that, the user onboarding to the technology, 100 % agree, Mark. I mean, there's so many people who I'll be wearing either my Rokids, my Evins, I've got the Halliday, they're all prescriptions. So it makes it little difficult for a random stranger that's looking through Coke bottle to see what I'm seeing. I could give them a 10 minute overview at a wedding and they're immediately going to buy one. That was the onboarding. It was super easy. You can watch YouTube. It's very intuitive. works even if you don't know how to turn it on. It's getting better. Yeah, but I mean you can put the sunglasses on they work you know so it works even if you don't know what you're doing out of the box it's a working function.
Lucky Gobindram: It's getting better too. It's getting way better. Right?
Damon: That's key. That's key. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: It's also natural behavior, right? How many times in your life have you, like, if you're not one of us, Kiki, have you gone and been like, let me put on a computer on my face, right? And like, it's legit a computer. It's also, one is, think the lines converge eventually. mean, metas try to play with it, right? If you look at all the new stuff that's come out on display in the last two weeks and like what you can do with it, all of a they're starting to make it smart, right? And like...
Damon: Exactly.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: the band has showing value, right? And even Apple's trying to copy that band thing of what you can start doing with the Apple watch and the connected ecosystem, Lines are gonna blur heavily, right? mean.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. Like one of the things I've actually started noticing in the Midwest is, you know, ⁓ getting into like the generations, know, Gen X has always been kind of, we like technology, we just don't trust it a lot because we don't want it to let us down. We've, our hopes are really high on what we've seen. And, but what I've noticing is that with the AI smart glasses, a lot of Gen Xers are going to it as hearing devices more than anything else because
Scott Patterson: Yes, yes.
Damon: Yeah. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Cool. Utility.
Mike Vann: Yep.
Gene Feldman: They don't have to, they don't have to worry about putting a hearing aid in because I'm a Gen Xer, name and element. I'm not old. I'm 17. I don't care what anybody says. You know, I'm not ready for hearing aids, but in spirit, but we grew up without volume limiters. You know, there's a reason why we can't hear today.
Damon: Right.
Lucky Gobindram: You're in spirit, in spirit, Jim.
Mike Vann: It's all those concerts, Gene. It's all the concerts.
Damon: That's right. ⁓
Mark G.: And if we had it, we turned them off. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. And so I've noticed that people that a lot of people that are gravitating to this, they're gravitating to it not because of the cool factor, is what AR and VR I think always had. They're gravitating it to the, relevancy factor, which is kind of going back to what Mark was alluding to.
Damon: functionality. that, that assistive tech that Mark talks about. Yeah, exactly. Well, the same can be said for the HUD that we were talking about earlier, right? It's not just HUD for HUD's sake. It's actually putting information up that somebody wants or needs or both.
Mike Vann: Utility. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I agree with you.
Gene Feldman: Well, well, think about military application. Airplanes have been using HUDs for years. And then I go back to the Apache helicopter, which I, my father-in-law was part of the quality program. So I always, that helicopter always has very special meaning to me, but you've got a pilot who's looking through a HUD on one eye and looking through reality through another eye that they, that they found that it is possible to use this type of technology in practical application.
Damon: ⁓ yeah.
Gene Feldman: It's just now we have to, to me, feel like we now, instead of selling it to people, we have to find the really good use cases that I think are going to the lowest common denominator to as many people as possible.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah, it's gonna happen naturally, right? Sorta like the cell phone.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, and to Scott's point though... Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that was I think one of your points, Scott, that it's a paraphrase it. Essentially, these things are adopted because they do something I need done and it just works. That's it. That's adoption. That's product adoption.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah I Will introduce one an additional thing and I'm one of the I'm one of those people who are you know, man of a certain age What what's what's gonna happen to our you know, I get on my Apple watch these these these limit these sound warnings at concerts I'm like, oh, it's too late. I mean, where were you freaking 25? Yeah, that's good fail. I mean like I've got it so high now I think I have to be in front of a train before even goes off, you know like
Gene Feldman: Yeah, yeah, no please.
Damon: That ship sailed, baby! You got a long ways to go before you get there, Lucky. Just trust us, it's true.
Scott Patterson: I mean, I'm, I'm reading the left. Yeah. Well, and the problem is I'm, young enough though, where I'm an, I mean, it's my problem, my ego problem, but I don't want to get hearing aids. It's like, I'm too young. It feels like you've aged into a whole other, you know, decade when you do that. I'm like, I'm, I'm holding on. I'm, I'm, I'm early in this decade. I got, you know, I got 15 years, you know, I'm like, yeah. ⁓ but I use the conversation boost on the metas.
Damon: Hahaha
Lucky Gobindram: I still got it!
Damon: ⁓
Scott Patterson: You know, and the second pair of those, the first pair were, you know, the full sunglasses. The second pair I got wise, got the transition lenses so I can wear them inside if I have my contacts and, you know, and then I've got the prescription ones. now, you know, I'll put the conversation boost on of those. I love that. And then the even realities. I think it's the even, I might be in the holidays. I'm getting some of my confused. But one of them also has, you know, a screen with the, I don't know if it's a translation ad, you can just turn on, it'll just basically close caption.
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: and then you can read the text of what people are saying and yeah I use those all the time yeah that's a huge help in a busy restaurant you know absolutely so yeah there's a use case
Lucky Gobindram: Did you get the ring, Scott, with it? Did you get the ring with it?
Scott Patterson: I didn't get the ring. No, I don't. You know, so far, the rings I have for the holiday and the mo three, think mo air pro three, they're kind of a pain in the butt to use. I don't I've not found really any good user interface on a display smart glass except maybe the even ⁓ but then even that like the touch pads weren't always don't always work for me. So but but anyway, I'll just
Lucky Gobindram: I the gestures are going to be the killer. When you start putting gestures in there and like you have the band on metal or like the Apple Watch connects to like an Apple device and it's like reading your inputs and you're able to, I think that starts closing the gap, right? And making it more natural to a user to be discreet and feel like they have a superpower and a clean interface other than where we are today.
Scott Patterson: yes i think so i think just yeah yeah Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. Like one of the things I tried with my Apple vision was the tap XR. It's that it's like a little wristband that has a little camera and captures your finger motions. So like you tap your index finger, it's an a you tap your middle finger to be and in different combinations. And so one of the things that I've been able to use with it is I can sit with my leg on my desk, on my, arm on my leg, and I can actually tap out text from it.
Scott Patterson: ⁓
Gene Feldman: The problem is it's like learning Morse code. Unless you're a Boy Scout or you really want to learn it, it is a challenge. They have a couple great onboarding game apps and stuff, but it still is kind of a challenge. to me, in the right direction.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mike Vann: for.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: Unfortunately, I think they've gotten lost in all the other noise.
Scott Patterson: Hmm.
Mike Vann: I think what's clear is that all these use cases ⁓ just make the proliferation of these glasses certain. mean, even just the most simple AI audio glasses where you can listen to a podcast, hear your messages read to you, and then make a call, that's going to get 4 billion people wearing glasses. It's going to happen.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I think so. I think the use cases are easy to see and there's enough of them that fit most people. The other thing in the United States, though, too, and I don't have data, I would love to see if anyone does have data, but it would be at least for the prescription users like us, we can use our FSA and HSA, know, health savings accounts, which are tax free for anyone, not in America. And also, you know, at least many people, when you consider like what your monthly expenses might be, it's almost like found money because we get that allotment at the beginning of our corporate year, and then it's just money that is slowly taken out of your paycheck. So it's almost like you can have, I think mine's 2,500 years, maybe 3,000 a year, and all of a sudden I have this money, and then these AI smart glasses with the prescription lenses are cool gadgets I can use to spend that money on. And so I don't know the percentage, but that is significant. My gut tells that significantly.
Damon: Mmm... Mm-hmm. You're qualified.
Lucky Gobindram: A nice little hack.
Damon: I agree, I agree, yeah.
Mike Vann: They're gonna catch up with Scott. He's got 11 pairs of glasses, you know?
Damon: hahahahah ⁓
Scott Patterson: Exactly. Yeah. Well, I think I've got nine, actually. But yeah. And how many of those did I buy with flex spending? Hopefully I won't have have appendix surgery this year now, but we'll see.
Mark G.: Yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: But it's a...
Lucky Gobindram: ⁓
Gene Feldman: The nice thing is what you guys aren't seeing is... But the nice thing is what now everybody's seeing he only wears four at one time.
Damon: Yeah, no kidding, right?
Scott Patterson: You But I'm convinced, so when I see like a non-prescription user really into it, those are the ones, frankly, between us, I'll try to do a deep dive and interview them and really understand like what's the functionality they like. And I've not found anyone so far to say the AI always on is like the big killer one. Like it's novel and it's cool and I use it a lot. ⁓
Damon: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: But I also would love if, say like on my Roka glasses, I've selected Gemini there. You can also use chat GBT, but they don't tie into my accounts. There's no memory of my overall now Gemini ecosystem of my notebooks that are now integrated. I mean, Google is just doing crazy stuff as we saw today. that's, mean, I'm getting ready to change iPhones to a Pixel. You know, if they keep going, this is amazing. But I want that history. I want it to be that.
Damon: Mm.
Scott Patterson: you know, college, you know, graduated student, know, what's that?
Lucky Gobindram: What series should have been?
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ no, I always look at it needs, it needs to have the functionality of a star Wars droid. You know, it needs to be on call ready. Cause right now to me, like the AI it's great if you're at trivia night, you know, it'll feed you the answers, you know, but like I sit here and think is that, know, if they've got cameras and this kind of gets into, ⁓ some, I, know, kind of a healthcare question, but kind of get kind of as we kind of flow through this.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. one and done. Yeah, yeah. Sure, yeah, yeah.
Gene Feldman: But one of the things I kind of started thinking about is, you know, for a practical use is, you know, if they could find a way, you know, like with the displays, adding spatial in there. Imagine for like a dementia patient, rather than having a house full of post-it notes, their kids could log into the account, change notes at will. And as they walk around with the glasses, they're displayed. That we start looking at that type of an assistant we need rather than, all right, I'm looking at this picture, what is it? You know what, I could have just asked the tour guide. You know, I didn't need to ask AI.
Mark G.: I mean, we've done similar things on the logistics side for last mile delivery too. Like we developed a patented thing around chirp. So it's the idea of actually using the stereo spatial speakers. My vice president is actually blind, Jim Holland. And, you know, he's somebody where, you know, when I was talking about the assistive tech, right? That's how I was introduced to him. And one of the aspects is right. Exactly what we're talking about. It's the aspect of.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ okay.
Damon: most VPs.
Mark G.: we can start building digital twins to assist the blind, assist low vision individuals so that ⁓ one, it makes their life easier. Again, it's the appeal, this functionality they didn't have, now they have. ⁓ In the low vision community, for example, ⁓ Google had a partner called Envision, and what they did is they would take the old eyeglasses and they would offer it to low vision or blind individuals.
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks
Mark G.: And the software literally would allow them to freely go to, a restaurant. Instead of asking their partner to read them the menu, they would just simply say, hey, whatever, eyeglasses, Android or whatever, what's on the menu? And it would read it back to them. The aspects also of the computer vision aspect of it, small language models, not big language models, things that can run on the device itself, where When we start seeing the coordination of, ⁓ when I go to a meeting and I'm wearing my glasses and I say, okay, take visual note of Scott, right? Associate Scott Patterson with my contacts list, right? So the next time I run my algorithm of who's in the room, right? It will tell me Scott Patterson's in the room, Mike's in the room, Gene's in the room, right? Those are where from an accessibility standpoint, things get really interesting, right? So. Those are sort of the, me as a practitioner in that space, that's where it's a really interesting platform, right? And it coincides to Scott's passion of the health, right? You know, that's the field, right? We want to assist users to make their life empowering, right? So, yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ and especially ⁓ yeah. And I spent years in a UPS doc. I would have loved to have had something that told me heavies were coming down the belt before they hit my trailer.
Mark G.: I can't talk about gene. I can't talk about those things yet.
Damon: Ha ha ha ha
Gene Feldman: As we get into, in the guarded territory.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah.
Damon: Well, Scott, Mark just opened the door on your favorite issue of health care. Do ⁓ you want to walk through that door a little bit?
Mark G.: Yeah, I have to drop guys, thanks.
Gene Feldman: You
Scott Patterson: So I'll just kick it off, Damon, though, with ⁓ understanding who the customer might be as I go through ideation for variety ⁓ of and kind of sectors. So. ⁓ you know, the first thing, at least in my kind of checklist of would ⁓ AI smart glasses be a good use case, whether it's without display or with display, I think it's important to separate those out. But anyway, the very first one, it's kind like back to the VR learning, you know, what's the best stuff to go with that. is the most important type of learning that also then has typically the biggest budgets to do something high tech like this. going to AI smart glasses, it's what do we have to have our hands free to do effectively? And using our hands could actually create a negative outcome to the person. I forget the name of the company, I have to Google it. there's a great example of this. There's somebody in the roofing industry that's made a variant the AI smart glasses for roofers. Obviously they can't be on their phones. I mean, how dangerous would that be when you're on a roof, even if you've got the safety line. And I'm not sure if they're available for sale yet, but they talk about them and you can kind of see the use case of it integrates with some major roofing system that manages compliance and kind of like end of job quality assurance. They're taking pictures of the roof after they're done. They can communicate, they can get references material off of this all hands free. whether it's healthcare or some other industry, know, where is something that is detrimental if you have to use your hands? you know, I go into things like surgical, you know, theaters, we're seeing Apple Vision Pro used in there. Could there be AI prompts, you know, without a display or probably something, you know, with AI glasses with a display that could help a surgeon in there or some of the, you
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: staff if a doctor's seeing a patient you know they pay often oftentimes doctors will pay actually human being to be that medical transcriber so they'll pay out their own pocket if they're ⁓ you know, medical group doesn't support that. So there's a lot of AI wearables taking that space. But if you just want glasses or easy off on you can still write with your pencil, pen and ⁓ anyway, you know, things like that. So I'm not going to give too much away. But those are the things the big things and like everything else is still a potential use case if people use it. ⁓ But I think the big markets to focus on commercially or to start with that first variable are
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: Do people wind up under threat of their lives if in this situation and they can't use their hands because of it? So, you know, that could also talk about EMT workers, et cetera. but there's a lot of those use cases. There's a lot of them commercially, a lot.
Damon: Hmm.
Scott Patterson: And people now have been using those at home. And now when they go to their job in the healthcare industry, ⁓ people are smart. They're already saying, well, why can't I use this here? It's like the iPhone moment we had years ago. Okay, why can I not use this cool device for work? So this whole idea of... certain companies making a consumer-only device and then they're very reluctant to make it enterprise or they don't want to release too much function on the enterprise side because they'll scare consumers. I think, that's a huge mistake. It's all one market ultimately. Enterprise typically has commercialized bigger pockets to buy them, but don't try to segregate the population because almost everybody is a consumer and an employee at the same time. ⁓ So anyway, that's one soapbox I'll get off of.
Gene Feldman: No, but it brings up a good point. mean, one of the companies I was at where I was leading the projects, we kept, we would always hit the OSHA wall. And, know, understanding that OSHA is a big driver on whether this tech can be integrated, not whether it's good. It's just integrated. And, you know, one of the things that I started realizing is, and that I would always try to argue is it can't be in now.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Gene Feldman: but that doesn't mean it won't be in at some point. it's, you know, even if you're waiting for the availability, it's important to test and figure out what you can or can't do, you know, but also understanding you are limited by other things such as OSHA, which really does can block things. Not speaking ill of OSHA, please don't come visit me guys.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Vann: Thanks.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, and like in the surgical area, there's a variety of requirements as well around the ability to clean things to a hygienic level. There's all kinds of different restrictions on almost every industry. So having somebody that knows those does help quite a bit.
Gene Feldman: Oh, absolutely. And the nice thing is you're seeing more and more companies. mean, healthcare is really where it's in some of the places that seems to be consistent, even though it's slow, but consistent growth, if I'm not misspeaking.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: I think one of the big things is that tech introduces new safety risks. I think that's the biggest thing when you're thinking about something. That's OSHA's big red flag also, Gene. I think the cool thing about this is that it doesn't, because if go full circle, this is the year VR had a bomb. This is spatial computing, sort of the way Apple repropositioned this medium.
Gene Feldman: Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: I think when we're looking at it, it's like VR falls within spatial computing. I think at this point, we're looking at convergence of these technologies and some will do better at doing both use cases and allowing you to throttle both realities. Some won't, right? Some will only be used for one or the other because they're more specialized. And you might have multiple devices if you're an average user and computing changes, right? But I think it's just like... Computing is changing, right? And I think that's what we're beginning to see more than anything, right? It's not just like VR or whatnot. think we're looking at the user base and the way they interact in general is going to change, right? And we're interested in a new OS for human interaction and human design.
Mark G.: Dan, to that point, Scott, do you see, right, like in your medical field, right, with the aspect of having these AI glasses sort of assisting you in the task that you're doing, right? Because like in the end, there's like the ethos of zero errors every time, right? Do you see a challenge with sort of the AI and its false confidence when advising users through these types of devices? Do you see any sort of issues with that?
Scott Patterson: Well, that's what I've heard from my friends that are doctors that have become my interview subjects and user personas as I write up a variety of things and use human design. ⁓ But they're already using the AI transcription maybe through a wearable or like a little mic. and they still have to double check it, but that's saving them so much time. That can just take like extra hours every day. I think if the risk reward is there, they're willing to assume more risk in their response. But ⁓
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: but it's got to be the reward there. So would it be a matter of am I looking something up like a drug interaction or something else that again has a significantly negative outcome to the patient that's high risk, risk. And then. Would that basically warrant me taking some risk in the information? I'm pretty sure, I don't know. But that is something, I think, certainly to think about, Mark. Yeah, I think you're on right track.
Mike Vann: It all seems to boil down to time and efficiency, right? Time is so valuable. And if these devices can help people, you know, cut down on these tasks, even some of the most mundane ones, but when people start to realize, wow, I just cut out, you know, four hours of my week doing transcription or taking these notes, they start to see the power and then the wheels start turning, right? What else can I do with this?
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: Thank you.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes, and what I'm hearing from mine, I'm not sure anybody else, but like, you know, there's a lot more educated patients coming in for these consults, because they've spent time on Gemini or chat GPT asking about the problem. So you know, there's this growing rift amongst patients of the AI capable that are now going in with, you know, arguably maybe college level understanding of what this what this is, that they've just got deep research, you know, coming out of a four page document.
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: with the latest medication, et cetera. And so now the doctor's also kind of challenged, but hopefully, as we've been saying a lot with AI across a variety of domains and topics, hopefully that's better because now the doctor can use their education at a higher level and be the higher level consultant versus something that maybe they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. It was just required because the patients were less educated.
Damon: Mm.
Mark G.: So it sort hints at like my wife loves WebMD and she always misdiagnoses her problems because she has access to WebMD. So yeah, so how do you solve that with AI glasses now? Yeah, I love it, love it.
Lucky Gobindram: You
Damon: you
Scott Patterson: You
Damon: Boy.
Gene Feldman: Whereas I'm on the opposite, my wife is in the healthcare field. And so sometimes I need, if she's mad at me, I need to verify that the instructions she's giving me are the correct ones.
Scott Patterson: Well, and I will say this is not related to you know, to AI smart glasses, but like perplexity now I'm on their health ⁓ function and their finance function. So I've uploaded all my financials into perplexity computer, or whatever, whatever they're calling it actually, it's not the computer. But and also my health and it goes like I've got all my Apple health from my Apple Watch and everything going through there now as well. So now maybe that is a control, you know, if I'm a hypochondriac. I start there, you know, I'm really curious about the AI health just in general that connection outside the glasses and what that's going to do.
Gene Feldman: For me, what scares me is, so years ago I used to be a high school teacher and I taught psychology. And whenever we got to abnormal behavior, I always had to give a full 16 minute lecture on, okay, we all have traits of everything. But just because you may associate, okay, you know what, because you have different moods, you do not have multiple personality disorder. You know, it was,
Scott Patterson: you
Gene Feldman: that sometimes I think people get tunnel vision and in the absence of information go straight to the worst case scenario. And I think even if we had information, we always want to look at the best, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. And I wonder if the tunnel vision, and sometimes we just joke there's arguments between doctors and patients based on information. Could, you know, me I'm on the fence of could it help or could it hinder what's what's already been the trend you know because again if it's on the internet it must be true.
Mark G.: Well, I mean, if you look at the traditional, even the VR practice that we have that's mature, right? One of the questions we always have is, will the technology create more problems than it solves? Right? I think you're kind of hitting that question, right, when it comes to practitioners approach, right? But yeah, you know, we don't want to create more problems than we're solving just by implementing a product, which I feel, specifically to the XR industry, that's a common problem. that we were doing over the years, right?
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: You're going to make everybody super confident, Mark. You know, it's the truth. I don't know. That may be a problem, right? People are already narcissistic.
Damon: Yeah. ⁓
Mark G.: Hey, have a gem on Google Gemini. Check it out.
Scott Patterson: idea. What is it?
Lucky Gobindram: It's going to literally make everybody think they're better than they are, right? Because they know all of a know more than they really know. False confidence.
Damon: Hahaha!
Mark G.: It's the false confidence, right? It's that false confidence problem with AI.
Lucky Gobindram: 100 %
Gene Feldman: But I think there's also, but I think that on the flip side though, in learning and development, think it could flip it though. And the only reason why I say that is there was a study a couple of years ago where they did a knee procedure. In one room they had a control, which was a teacher, student, and a fake knee. In the other room they had just a person with an XR headset with an AI app that drove them through the procedure. And it showed there was like 75 % greater comprehension, you know, in less time. It was like 75 % less time for comprehension. And what they realized was it wasn't so much the technology. It was that there wasn't, were, the learner was not consistently asking for validation. They weren't going, am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? If you go to the next step, you did it right. And that actually they saw was building confidence in a learner. So that's where it's like, I agree with you, Mark, but it's like, then again, learning and development is always that unique field.
Lucky Gobindram: It's like parenting to some degree, Gene? like, as anytime, so you got some of it, you gotta let them fail. Some of it you gotta start correcting, right? There has to be a recourse there where there's like virtual manager that's seeing what you're seeing and be like, no, no, no. You know, do this this way or like, don't do that. This is gonna explode. Like, know, and like guardrails, right? ⁓
Damon: Thank
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah. Absolutely. mean like AI Glass is monitoring your task and it catches what you missed. So rather than telling you what to do, it says, stop, stop, stop, don't touch that. You know, something like that where it's that instant validation feedback. And you know, and trust me after a while we will get annoyed by it and there you get into classical conditioning.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm going present.
Scott Patterson: then we'll turn it off. But that's another great use case, industrial use case. I someone was talking about working at UPS before or, know, warehouse. Yeah. But I mean, do an SOP validation, just, you know, compliance workflow validation, you know, especially if there's a compliance need. I know if anyone's seen this lab OS that Nvidia has set up, I think with Qualcomm.
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: And they're showing display AI smart glasses and the capabilities for someone working in a lab. Tens of compliance, tons of standard operating procedures about how to do a variety of testing and for safety sake. And here we have a device that can say, ⁓ my god, hey, ⁓ red alert, change the whole color display. You just skipped a whole step and you're about to combine two chemicals that are going to end your life. ⁓ So that's a great use case. I and I see that as happening. It's like that passive camera without us even prompting, just watching what we're doing, object detection, knowing what we're doing, know, fast AI. And ⁓ then you reverse that, of course, as we both know, Gene, you can turn that into the training. This is the SOP, you know. ⁓
Damon: Hmm, well...
Scott Patterson: And I think someone was talking about Rambler maybe on a previous episode, you can just film, you know, using it and then that reverse engineers that into the whole SOP document. So, and then trains people on how to do that. all of that is again, and that's where, that's where commercial businesses are willing to spend the money to do this because it saves human lives and it's more efficient. So I think those are the easy, measurable. Thank you. Yes.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: Measurable too. Can't quantify.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Scott Patterson: quantifiable. And so pay various smart glasses for that. We've got to display it, you $800, maybe commercially, you know, 1200 if they're, you know, if they're OSHA lenses that are, you know, lab capable. And that's easy money to spend. What we say Mark?
Mark G.: I mean also from the standpoint of training. Well, the other thing is also in an operational or industrial environment, we have CT cameras running where we're required due to regulation to store the video. That's training material in a secure environment on top of what we're getting from the devices. So you're sort of developing this sort of mass ecosystem potentially for a particular operation. ⁓ And then applying or governing rules based on what the AI is seeing.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Mark G.: That's a really interesting use case, right?
Scott Patterson: Yeah, you know, the one thing that I would say is, is the end user, do they ever get the feedback, you know, versus the real time feedback? So does a learning, you know, experience for them to avoid in the future versus just, you know, the AI training material, but yeah.
Mike Vann: Are those assets? Do the assets from the glasses, do we see those, that video and those assets that you're talking about, Mark, do we see those contributing to training for physical AI and robotics in the future or do we need to use headsets for that still? mean, it feels like, yeah.
Mark G.: I've got to be careful what I say, ⁓ but generally, more data usually helps the situation. ⁓ How you use data, I'm going to give you the Spider-Man speech, having the power comes responsibility speech. Companies like Anthropic and others that we've referenced have some good methods and there's others that don't. ⁓ What we do with it...
Damon: He might have to kill you.
Mike Vann: Yep.
Lucky Gobindram: Look at what the antics doing, right?
Damon: Hahaha!
Gene Feldman: You
Mark G.: really plays into it, right? ⁓ I've seen data be interpreted wrong, right? Or data works great for three months and then for whatever reason the model decides to teach you to do something totally different. What was the cause of that? Maybe prompt injection by a user, right? And there wasn't guardrails that were properly placed, or maybe the model or method that you were using had a certain issue with it, right? ⁓ Who knows? Data has to be sustainable. That's the other thing, right? ⁓ And something like AI glasses or this framework we're talking about, right? There's a lot of challenges in that when the model changes every three months, right? As an integrator, as a developer, how do you handle that, right? It's a huge challenge. ⁓ So yeah.
Damon: Alright.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. And especially when the, right now we're going through the rebuilding year. So as steam gets lost, you know, the teams get cut, the projects get cut, you know, it, it sets us back, but I don't think people also realize how far it us back. Cause then we almost have to start from scratch all over again, once it builds back up and it makes it really hard to stay the long course. And it's one of the things that I think we've all. seen is that VR has had more false starts than any technology I think that exists out there.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Mark G.: I think that gives us experience in the AI space. I don't know how many times I've heard stories that, boy, does it smell like XR from the hype cycle or whatever else.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely! Well, it goes back to the old thing about Edison. ⁓ People don't remember the 999 times he failed. They only remember the one time he stole from Tesla.
Scott Patterson: Ha ha!
Damon: Nice, nice. Well, Gene, we've got... No, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. You're the guest. Go ahead.
Scott Patterson: I do worry though, you go ahead Damon, sorry. I do worry just the organizational, the domain knowledge within the industry as more people getting laid off and then fully pivoting to AI so they can make their mortgage. I mean, you know, there's the amount of the pool of jobs available in XR as an industry is obviously shrinking and it continues to shrink. I, you know, I, feel like we are an industry that often eats our young, you know, what we'll have big platform providers. big chipset providers kick off. don't want to name names, kick off a program, off a whole new operating system, get everyone, get a whole bunch of ISVs involved. And then at the last minute, you know, it doesn't work out or, Hey, we're the biggest provider of HMDs and let's, let's make this whole program so that we can, you know, do so and so. then after millions are invested, then that goes, and then the whole team is laid off. then, you know, so it's
Damon: No, I know, I know. You
Scott Patterson: It is a concern because if you are a believer in the technology and especially at that intersection of AI and these concepts around, know, XR being the user interface for AI and especially we can certainly see that I think with, know, the wearables and AI smart glasses, you know, I would say that that is the best. I'm not going to pull my phone out to ask AI a question. I do if it's a big deal. But if I have glasses on, I'm talking to it all the time. I think in passively see what I'm doing and give me that human performance feedback. mean, that's just amazing utility for AI. It's using it to its fullest and allowing the agency of AI and human interaction to be fully realized. So if you believe in those things, then the medium term will be very profitable. But at the end of the day, how many people will still be left here?
Lucky Gobindram: .
Scott Patterson: won't be retired and won't be, you know, in a different industry.
Mark G.: Who's gonna buy the product? That's the question, right? Is there gonna be enough people around to buy the product and not be disenchanted by the product in the process?
Damon: Wow.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah. as well as I think some of the companies realizing that there is collateral damage when they make these decisions. ⁓ I mean, like I remember three years ago, the number one field to get into was 3D asset building. It was getting into all of that architecture and all of that. Even my son was a design.
Scott Patterson: Well. I don't think they do. I wish they did though, Gene. They don't. They don't.
Damon: Yeah, I agree. They do not. They do not. I agree with Scott. Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: Hehehe
Damon: That ship sailed.
Lucky Gobindram: Mm.
Gene Feldman: got his degree in design, digital, or design, graphic design. No, I don't, I did not give, I don't have children that are accountants. I am not capable of that. Yeah.
Mark G.: I thought you were going to say accounting.
Scott Patterson: Hahaha!
Damon: hahahahah ⁓
Scott Patterson: It's impossible for you to build that type of a human being, right?
Lucky Gobindram: You
Damon: You know what they say about accounting, right? CPA now stands for ⁓ Claude Prompting Acuity.
Scott Patterson: Ha ha.
Gene Feldman: Nice. ⁓ so with my son and they talking that, you know, the 3d asset building, all of that for AR XR that's there was such a drive for it. But now we just watched a thousand animator digital animators get laid off from a very big company that, ⁓ and you've got unity light where, or mesh sheet.
Damon: Yes.
Gene Feldman: these companies that can design 3D assets based on AI. So all these kids that are just now finishing their career are already out of job.
Damon: Mm-hmm.
Lucky Gobindram: Or they gotta change their workflows. They gotta be AI whisperers in addition to what they have. They gotta adopt and change their times. I don't think the jobs disappear. I think the jobs change. Skills are parallel. How they apply those skills is different, right?
Damon: Yeah, they're getting their certifications. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Damon: That's right. That's exactly what happened with graphic design back in the day, right? Instead of using Xacto knives and paste, they switched over to digital. The same thing will happen here. The professionals will still be there. They just change their workflow.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: I'm sure they were like, fuck Photoshop back then. They're like, we're not gonna, we'd rather cut it out and put it instead, glue it to a piece of paper and make it, make this in a physical, packed-out way, right?
Gene Feldman: Absolutely.
Damon: Absolutely. ⁓ yeah, yeah, we remember all those arguments.
Gene Feldman: But to be fair, yeah, but to be fair, I would love Print Shop back. That was the easiest one to ever use.
Damon: ⁓ wow, I haven't heard that in a long time.
Lucky Gobindram: BLEH!
Scott Patterson: thought you were going to say, corrupt role. ⁓ my god.
Gene Feldman: Hahahaha!
Lucky Gobindram: Gold is gold, but not necessarily efficient, right? We want to create a bigger the ability to do more.
Gene Feldman: Hahaha!
Damon: For those of you listening, get the AI to look that one up for you. That's really reaching back.
Scott Patterson: Yes, it's probably vibe coded, you know.
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. I think I still have a book back here somewhere from it.
Damon: That's going back to page maker. ⁓
Gene Feldman: Or don't forget Dreamweaver. That was always a fun one.
Damon: ⁓ That was a good one.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ yeah, that was a moment. That was a moment though. mean that Dreamweaver was revolutionary. I mean come on, that was revolutionary. Yeah, props.
Damon: It was, it really was, yeah. And aptly named for its day, for its day. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ it, it, yeah, unfortunately. Absolutely. All right. Well, we're almost out of time. So I want I want to be conscious of our time in our listeners time. ⁓ So, Scott, one of the things that we actually ask is is kind of the last protocol that if there was something that somebody was getting into this space or somebody listening that has questions, what's a piece of advice that you would want to share with them as they either start or continue their journey in this space?
Scott Patterson: That's a good question. mean, XR is a very small industry. And I think if you do plan on trying to make this your career, you know, for a decade or longer, it's really going to be who you know, that's going to help you pivot and change. And that includes, you know, having a mentor, I mentor people, if you find me on LinkedIn, want to mentor, happy to mentor you, I might tell you to run. So I don't know. There's a lot of people being laid off right now. I mean, ⁓ it's very tough. I would want to know what your vision is ultimately. What's your vision in XR that you want to help build toward? ⁓ So I think having a mentor and I also think just in general going to things like AWE, know, just go if you're a student, I believe they have a student, you know, discount rate. I think they also have what do we call them? You know, basically, if you if you're if you don't have the funds, I think there are scholarships, I think as well. Like just go join VRA, are joined different things to connect with the community because it's really going to be. It's a very nascent technology. We are dealing with a dramatic reduction in the amount of investment dollars in the industry. And if you want to be in the industry, you're going to have to be really creative and make sure you can pay your rent. And we want you to have a stable job with the right people. And it's also good to understand a lot of different elements to it. mean, really, it's such a nascent technology. There's so much we can still do with this.
Damon: Yes.
Scott Patterson: outside of just AR, but AR with content creation. I mean, I'm still a big believer in, know, we're be able to put a VR headset on and have. you know, project holodeck, can tell it go pull, you know, the Sherlock Holmes public domain, you know, hounds of the Baskervilles, like that old Star Trek Next Generation, you know, major myself, but you know, like stuff like that, just amazing. There's a whole bunch of cool stuff that we can do. ⁓ So that would be my advice. Find a mentor, multiple mentors and be part of the community. It's not a good industry. If you're an introvert, that's going to stay at home all the time, you need to force yourself. to connect with industry groups and find people.
Damon: Bingo. Yep. Well said. Well said. Good job, Yeah. Awesome. Where's that applause icon? Applause. Applause.
Gene Feldman: No, absolutely. I completely agree. We are, we are a living example of it. Absolutely.
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Mike Vann: Thank
Scott Patterson: I mean, really, if it was my nieces and nephews, I would tell them probably to avoid the industry. mean, you know, like, really, I mean, that's the truth. If it's just someone, I'm gonna go to college, what should I do? If your plan is to, you know, what's your plan? If your plan is to make a lot of money, you go to where the money is, you go into finance. If your plan is to, hey, I don't care about money, you know, I'm an art, whatever, you know. So for whatever reason, this is industry that speaks to me.
Damon: ⁓ Don't do this
Gene Feldman: Yeah
Scott Patterson: and I'm stuck here whether they like it or not. So there's already a gauntlet, a multiple gauntlet someone will have gone through at this point, coming out of XR program at Northeastern or whatever and probably X amount of dollars in loans and I want you to be able to pay those loans on.
Gene Feldman: It-
Damon: The way Mike is smiling, I think he feels your pain on that.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. Ehhuh
Mike Vann: I listen I it's so true we've all lived it but you know we all need to we're pivoting right now and merging AI and XR and it's working so just learn AI and how you can leverage it.
Damon: you Ha ha!
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Just go with it, baby, go with it, yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, I've learned it's just you develop Stockholm syndrome to your career.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. Yes.
Mark G.: Yeah, my first question to all the interns is, are you crazy? You know, we're actually wanting to do this. I'll tell you right now, if I was saying I would have left this field a long time ago.
Damon: If you are, maybe you're in the right place.
Gene Feldman: Hehehehehe
Mike Vann: If you're crazy, this is the right place for you.
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Damon: Hahaha!
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. We, but then again, we're the dreamers and believers as Willy Wonka would say, or Jim Henson.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ think Jim Henson, I you were going into that. Very similar, very similar minds. Yes. Come at the frog. Yeah. Yeah.
Damon: I thought, yeah, I thought he was going to, yeah.
Gene Feldman: or was Kermit the Frog. There we go. I'll go with that. ⁓ but seriously, Scott, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation has been absolutely awesome. And if you ever want to come back, if you ever have anything that you want to share or any updates, or you just want to be part of the panel for a week or two, the seat, it will always be open for you, my friend. All you gotta do is reach out and let me know. I don't want to end date you with invites, but if you want to.
Damon: Yee-hoo!
Lucky Gobindram: Hahaha
Scott Patterson: Thank you guys. I really enjoyed it. ⁓ thank you.
Damon: Yeah.
Gene Feldman: I would be more than happy to send your way.
Scott Patterson: I would love that. really enjoyed this. This is the best of the XR industry. Go ahead, Mike.
Mark G.: ever ⁓ we gotta ask Scott the question Scott Scott what would be what what
Damon: Awesome.
Gene Feldman: He said we're the best! First, I just wanna make sure that's on tape. He said we're the best!
Damon: You got that in recording, right? Right?
Scott Patterson: ⁓ This isn't though. It's really this ideation. Like this is the thing. It's full of super smart people that are all visionary that normal people, our mothers and fathers, if we're still alive, our siblings, our children, probably think we're a bunch of weirdos and this very esoteric thing. And we probably are because we're creating, developing controlled hallucinations that you can stick on this base computer and go into.
Damon: Aww.
Mike Vann: Very true.
Scott Patterson: what is that about exactly, but we like it and we see value in it. There's a lot of service to humanity that it can do. when I, this to me is when we make cool things together. So like we should just do a hackathon.
Damon: Man. I'm so glad this is still recording. This is great.
Scott Patterson: I would love to hear their opinion though of just AI and human interaction and why that an alternative viewpoint to AI smart glasses being the best way to do that. I mean, so many people have left.
Mark G.: Cool. Someone that would argue the AI glasses are just going to make you dumber.
Damon: or... or they're a fad or...
Gene Feldman: hahahahah
Scott Patterson: Well, I think we can find a lot of people will say that because it's just the same. It's the same trope every time the smartphone, you know, we just got every technology that's been released. That was an argument, obviously, for, you know, same with the privacy issues, you know, ⁓ my God, there's a camera now. I'm going to be film doing something. I don't know. ⁓
Lucky Gobindram: Okay. But it's hard to debate the value, Numbers don't lie. thing is, VR was, people were trying to put a square and a peg, right? Because some people that loved it, I love it. And there is some value, but there's also a whole other side that's counterbalancing all the value that you can create with it, right? So I think it's like, things that keep you in the real world, where you are, and add value to your real world, it's hard to like...
Damon: Yeah. I love it. Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: They're actually almost less intrusive than the mobile phone or tablet or another device that we're giving people in the field to do things because your hands are locked up, right? And you're also face down in it. So.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: Well, you're also unlocking that money the way, know, remember Scott brought that point up earlier FHA HSA, you know, those medical dollars, when that unlocked for AR glasses, bang, that unlocked the, I know there's gotta be data out there. There's gotta be marketing data on that.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ especially as they increase its usage, I can see it being reclassified as durable medical equipment. It's not just for seeing, they're not just prescription eyeglasses. And once it becomes durable medical equipment,
Lucky Gobindram: I don't need to somebody lobbying for that ASAP. They're not. I'm sure they are.
Damon: Yep, you bet. Yep. That's a idea. Yeah, they sure do. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Vann: ⁓ it's happening.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, but the thing is almost all insurance companies cover durable medical equipment at 100%.
Scott Patterson: Wow, totally. Especially if you remember Divergence. Yeah, yeah, especially if you have no divergence, know, ADHD or autism or something else that could be that we have a proven solution for in some way learning disability, it can reach you, you know, through the audio. I mean, there's I think you're onto something there, Gene, for sure.
Mike Vann: Yeah.
Damon: Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: I wonder if somebody's ever tried that in like a classroom, right, with like children or like ADHD that are wearing glasses versus children are not, like a dual test, right?
Damon: Surely they have. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: I can tell you as a teacher with young children with ADD, you're not getting anything done.
Lucky Gobindram: it.
Damon: Unless, unless you have some one-on-one.
Gene Feldman: They're running around like crazy. Yeah, I mean, but I could tell you, you know, I mean, most public schools now they are, there has been a push for XR and VR and a lot of this tech in schools because what they're actually starting to see is just kind of going back to Scott's point, you know, like in history, being able to relive historical events, being like world geography, being able to travel.
Lucky Gobindram: Yeah, retention is so much better in those cases, without a doubt.
Damon: Yeah, like Bob Stone was ticket. Yeah. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: And I'm a firm believer that there hasn't been as big a revolution in education since Socrates first asked why. and why I say that is because when you get into actual education, it's you need a consistent, repetitive and safe environment. know, and VR gives you that each and every time and it's a consistency that each learner gets the exact same story. Sorry, I get,
Damon: HAHAHAHA To which Alexander the Great said, why not? Hmm.
Gene Feldman: on my soapbox now.
Damon: That's okay.
Scott Patterson: I mean, it has revolutionized learning for sure. That's where I came from. that's, you know, if we're looking for the industry to continue to grow in a bad time, we should continue to focus on more use cases related to that because that's the surefire draw, you know.
Gene Feldman: I mean, like watching what Conveya and Dialogue Trainer and ⁓ Virtual Speech have been doing. It's just been incredible. I think one of the keys that's really been successful for them is that their user interface, you don't need to be us to create these courses. Anybody can do it.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, yeah, back to the onboarding. Yes, exactly. Back to the onboarding conversation and I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with Sophie from virtual. ⁓ the virtual speech. Thank you. Yeah, just sort of bring it further myself. Virtual speech. And she's got a great story because I was doing volunteer work for the MIT hackathon.
Gene Feldman: Virtual Speech.
Scott Patterson: And anyway, she helped me as one of the user personas or something we were working on. Virtual speech was kind of an accidental business. It was an accidental startup. was really just Dom created that app for her to practice. And then it became this whole, so it's a great origin story for that business. I would get her on. And then they've done a lot of cool stuff with AI as well. And they could talk about kind of, you know, productizing AI to increase, you know, ⁓ capability that she's, and she's a lovely, she's just awesome.
Damon: ⁓ huh. Brilliant. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Damon: Okay, that sounds good. That sounds real good.
Scott Patterson: ⁓ Yeah.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ absolutely. I mean, yeah. And we've actually had the pleasure of watching Lucky grow his business in this field. You know, ⁓ watching him and what him and his brother have been doing throughout this and the results. Lucky, I'm stealing your thunder. I'm sorry, my friend. That's what I do, man. But ⁓ absolutely. But some of the insights.
Lucky Gobindram: Nice ship. It's okay.
Damon: Haha!
Scott Patterson: for that.
Damon: It's all free PR.
Gene Feldman: that Lucky and his brother have actually been able to glean from this and share. It's just, it's really giving us a great idea of what potential could come next in this field. So.
Mark G.: Hey, Hey, Scott. Last question. Really last question. Do you remember your eureka moment when it came to VR or AR? There was that one first time experience where it was just like, this is the drug. This is the hook. Do you remember that?
Damon: Really, really, really, really, really.
Gene Feldman: Hahahaha
Damon: Amen.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, I mean literally is it was DK one it was literally taken that that thank you at Palmer Lucky taking that box out it was like 640 40 screens weren't they the very first DK one like it was just ridiculously low res. God I don't even know what was the frame frame or was the it was like 35. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean like it was just I forget. Yeah, I forget what we had for like
Lucky Gobindram: Thanks for watching. Yeah Plug it into the PC. Get your little sensor set up so you have your whole boundary. Try not to knock that shit over.
Scott Patterson: demos even back then, but it was just minimal. It was just, you could see it. That was the moment. I mean, I would say probably the second big moment, Mark, is ⁓ working at a big four consulting firm, owning our internal VR learning strategy, training our partners on leadership skills and seeing these very intense, basically like VPs in a corporation go into VR. I would, to your earlier point, I would spend 30 minutes onboarding them before we did any training as a whole separate session. So they knew how to operate, control everything, use the headset. That was definitely a ⁓ requirement for success, critical success factor. But I would see them be like kids, 50, 60 year old, plus folks that have very intense jobs, constantly stressed out, dealing with huge budgets and responsible for hundreds of people's employment and big clients. And here I am seeing them so overwhelmed by this cool experience that they had become six year olds in front of my face and been completely vulnerable. And then, and so that moment of them getting it and seeing how cool it is, and then talking to them six weeks later, if they've gone through the program, and had all this amazing interactive, multi collaborative and self study, learn, you know, learning happening, and them validating the effectiveness of it like that is, that's a hard audience to impress. And that was the other thing. As far as AR, I think we're still there. But I'm so glad, I think it's still to come. But I'm so glad that the AI smart glass revolution is building AI AR faster than we previously anticipated. Three years ago in the metaverse hype cycle, I never would have anticipated AR. There's always ARs coming in seven years at that level. Not that we have AR HUD displays or not AR in my mind, but anyway, I think that's yet to come.
Damon: you but it's mainstream enough now that even my wife is looking at buying one. And I don't want to frame up exactly for you what that means. I'll just let the implication lie there.
Scott Patterson: Yes.
Gene Feldman: Well, but you gotta look at it. mean, it's been what, less than a year since the displays hit and really this kind of, I mean, and what, two years for the, I think the metas themselves. So it's been really a very quick turnaround on this.
Damon: You
Mike Vann: Mm-hmm.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, yeah.
Damon: Yeah, relatively speaking, yeah. Well, let's wait to see what happens in 2029 when Skynet goes live.
Gene Feldman: Yeah, and at
Scott Patterson: What?
Gene Feldman: Nah, it's not.
Mark G.: Yeah, no, I'm making a prediction. We're going to get AI backlash. You're going to get a lot of people just like VR when it was 2014, where there's such a hype and big, big money is going to spend big money. I hate to say it, but it'll probably kick us to a recession because so much is being betted on this that people are going to get tired of it. And it's going to be a case where it just doesn't perform well.
Scott Patterson: Bye.
Damon: Nah, I'm gonna disagree. Nah, I'm gonna disagree. Nah. They're already tired of it. They've already passed that. They've already passed that. And then we went to the next level. And now we say there's another bubble. And then we went to the next level. And then we say it's dead-ended on the connectivity and the, know, what could it possibly provide next? And then we went to the next level. No, we're nowhere clear. We're nowhere clear.
Scott Patterson: I agree with Damon actually. I mean, I think I do agree with you, Mark, and that like we're seeing the social cues, you know, who was it that I forget he was a ex ex Google ex alphabet CEO to the commencement speech recently for some and people are booing as he's talking about AI hit the news, you know, it's out there on Reddit to first page. So there's like the some human element of kickback. But I think I think Damon said I mean, as far as investment and venture capital dollars, I mean my retirement's bet on Nvidia. ⁓ mean, it's got, yeah, I mean, we've got a huge runway, like all the use cases, all the low hanging fruit in AI has either been touched. mean, they're like, you know, I think there's a long way to go. I do think we could see, especially younger generation, like, you know, like some kind of either hopefully nonviolent or potentially.
Mike Vann: Thank
Mark G.: Hey man, last quarter it- it- 46 % up. So I totally get it, you know? I totally get it.
Damon: Hahaha! Yeah. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: destruction of data centers or some kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the social element is still there, but I think as people see, ⁓ my God, cancer is now solved for the type of cancer my grandma had. I don't think anyone can deny or will be able to the positive. So it's an interesting time to be alive.
Mark G.: We're already seeing like the food robots on the west coast and tipped over and stuff, but you know
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of those positives are going to fade into the background fabric of technology. won't be, it won't be obvious to people that AI is the thing. It'll just be that stuff works.
Gene Feldman: Yeah.
Scott Patterson: They might want to make sure that people know that because I do think the negatives are going to be bigger negatives too.
Damon: Well, there's some grassroots efforts from ⁓ our global competitors to generate even more negatives. know, that's a thing too. Global competition is high when this much money is on the line. Man, ⁓ some people get really intense.
Scott Patterson: Yeah. And I would argue damn it's more than money. I mean, this is a world dominant dominance. So if we're still stuck, if we cannot get to a place of abundance where we're no longer fighting for resources amongst geopolitical entities, I mean, hopefully we can. You know, this is stupid. We're still Neanderthals. Like this is dumb, you know, but come on, we don't need to have enemies and nuclear bombs anymore. I come on, this is all. But as long as we do, you know, like, like it's, it's, it's actually, you know, geopolitical.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. I really do.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ yeah.
Damon: I agree, yeah.
Scott Patterson: This is world dominance.
Damon: This is, yeah. Yeah, it really is. So is that the final protocol, Gene? Is that it?
Scott Patterson: I could go forever.
Gene Feldman: ⁓ no. mean, and the thing is almost, yeah, I think it will be because the only thing I was going to bring up was going to be the argument over we're arguing whether AI is going to take over the world. If they can't get the data centers built, it's never going to happen.
Damon: Ha
Mark G.: Well, it's not sustainable. We already know it's not sustainable.
Scott Patterson: Elon's going for the sky though. It's gonna be, it's gonna be even worse. Put him in orbit, it's terrifying. Then we're really talking about Terminator, right? God, can you imagine? Yeah.
Lucky Gobindram: putting them in the clouds
Damon: It'll be fine. Yeah, put it in the cloud, put it in orbit, they'll figure it out.
Gene Feldman: Yeah. I know. Alright out.
Mike Vann: And maybe we bring someone in on one of these episodes that's tied into the space industry. That might be interesting. There might be something there.
Damon: That would be fascinating that really would
Gene Feldman: Yeah, in 20 years there'll be a board cube just orbiting Earth. That's our entire internet.
Scott Patterson: That might be good, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, no, I'm yeah. How many, how many more starlings is SpaceX because they're getting ready to IPO. I thought I'd have like 10 times more starling satellites and like two years or something. I mean, it's just going to be, and then our phones, I don't know if you've watched in cellular, but like all the phones will connect into the, the LAOs, you know, so your starling will become a phone provider. So, you know, which is. Yeah.
Gene Feldman: edit Yeah.
Damon: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I won't need all these towers around me. It's just going to be going. Hey, let's instead of a instead of a Borg cube gene, let's make it a Borg sphere. We'll call it Moonbase Alpha and we'll put it on the moon.
Scott Patterson: Yeah, exactly.
Gene Feldman: I love it. But all right now I have is the Riddler from Batman and Robin that we're all going to be porting the brain with straight into our brains.
Damon: You You That's true, that's already true. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Scott Patterson: Yeah.
Damon: How do you know that hasn't already happened, Lucky? And you're just laying in a cot somewhere, in a little pod, in the Matrix. And the rest of us are not real.
Scott Patterson: Hahaha!
Gene Feldman: All right. All right. Now that now that we're at a point where now that we're at the point of questioning whether we're actually in the matrix, I think ⁓ we have hit the gambit as well as we.
Mike Vann: and end the thing.
Damon: Maximum, maximum geek level!
Gene Feldman: Absolutely. And we have, and we've also thrown in for those of you not from the Midwest, a traditional Midwestern goodbye. We say goodbye about four times before it actually is over.
Damon: You
Mike Vann: Nice work, Gene.
Gene Feldman: So, so everybody, thank you for listening. Scott, thank you for joining the protocol team. Thank you for joining. And please, if you enjoyed the episode, subscribe on YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify. And we look forward to seeing you on the next protocol. Thank you guys.
Scott Patterson: Thank you.
Damon: Thank you all. Bye bye. Thanks, Scott. Bye bye.
Mark G.: Cheers guys, good luck.
Scott Patterson: Thanks everybody.
Mike Vann: Thanks, Scott.
